January 2009 No jail again over haul of child images CLEETHORPES artist Edi Richter has been spared prison after being found with obscene images of pornography involving children. He ended up in court again after failing to learn his lesson following a high-profile case – nearly six years earlier – in which another hoard of child pornography images was discovered. Richter (58), of Rowston Street, admitted four offences of making indecent photographs of children on dates between June 2004 and September 2006. Two other similar charges and another of possessing indecent photographs of children were ordered to lie on the court file. Richter claimed that his estranged wife had access to the computer and there was originally due to have been a trial, with her giving evidence via a video link from America, where they married. They met on the internet. Richter appeared for sentence at Doncaster Crown Court and was given a community order for two years, with a supervision requirement for two years. He was ordered to attend a sexual offenders’ treatment programme and was given an indeterminate sexual offences prevention order. He must also register as a sex offender for five years and was banned from working with children. He was spared prison again after Recorder Julian Goose QC indicated at a previous hearing before Hull Crown Court that he would impose a community sentence, despite Richter’s previous convictions, in 2003, for child pornography offences. The prosecution said Richter downloaded the indecent images from a website where he would have realised that the images were of children. The guilty pleas involved 39 indecent images of children, some of them of the same girl in different poses. Catarina Sjolin, mitigating, told the Hull hearing that Richter accepted that, when he looked at the images, he would have suspected that they were of children. As reported in February 2003, Richter was given a two-year community rehabilitation order and was told to pay £1,000 costs. He had been convicted by a jury at Grimsby Crown Court of possessing and taking indecent photographs of children. The trial heard that he downloaded more than 60,000 images from the internet. At the time, it was revealed that Richter spent 15 years working for social services and helped arrange foster care for youngsters in what is now North East Lincolnshire. The court heard he compiled a home video from graphic photographs of young naked girls and repeatedly used the camera to zoom in on their private parts. Richter later pretended in court that he collected the images to paint some of them because “there was an innocence about them”, but his story was rejected by the jury.