FORMER OLD COLWYN MAN HAROLD MOSELY SPARED JAIL IN CAERNARFON
In July 2014, Harold Mosely, a 55-year-old from Old Colwyn, was spared imprisonment after being found with a significant amount of illegal content.Caernarfon Crown Court heard that police discovered over 23,200 child abuse images and 477 indecent videos on his devices.
During their search of his former residence in Old Colwyn, officers also uncovered more than 420,000 additional images that were not categorized during their examination of his computer equipment.
"There was such a volume they stopped counting," prosecutor Richard Edwards explained.
Mosely, who resides on Outram Street in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, was sentenced to a three-year community order.
Judge Peter Heywood emphasized that the punishment was serious, stating, "It’s not a light sentence, it’s demanding." He also ordered Mosely to participate in an internet sex offenders' treatment program and imposed a three-year ban on unsupervised contact with children without approval from his probation officer, unless such contact was inadvertent.
Additional measures included registering as a sex offender for five years, along with a sex offenders’ prevention order for the same duration.
He was also ordered to pay £80 in court costs.
Referring to a pre-sentence report, Judge Heywood remarked, "If I were to pass the appropriate sentence I suspect I would be passing a sentence in the region of 18 to 21 months at most, that would mean you spent less than twelve months in custody and there would be no provision to address your offending behaviour." Mosely admitted to 16 counts of making and possessing child abuse images, as well as possessing extreme pornography, following his arrest in January last year at his home in Old Colwyn.
During his arrest, he told officers, "If you are going to arrest me do it now before my wife wakes up." The prosecutor stated that during the police interview, Mosely made full admissions, explaining, "He said he had been downloading the images for six to twelve months.
He didn’t know why but he had been stupid." He also claimed that he mainly viewed images of children aged 12 to 14.
