No mercy for victims of abuse, but one third sliced off Beale s time behind bars
The Plettenberg Bay computer engineer who was last year sentenced to 15 years imprisonment after pleading guilty to about 19,000 charges of possession of child pornography, successfully appealed his sentence in the Western Cape High Court last week – YOLANDE STANDER reports
William Beale was sentenced to 15 years behind bars in the Thembalethu Regional Court in George in November last year, but last week the high court reduced his sentence to 10 years.
The three-judge panel said the decision to reduce the sentence was reached after thorough consideration of the sentences imposed in comparable matters, the facts of the matter, the seriousness of the crimes, the appellant’s circumstances, an element of mercy (in view of the history of abuse suffered by the appellant in his younger days), as well as the interests of the community and “ultimately” the interests of children.
Beale was the first South African to have been arrested as part of Operation Cloud 9 – an operation involving SA and Belgian police – which is responsible for cracking down on an international child pornography network.
The ring is linked to a cyber meeting space for paedophiles whose fetishes seem to be the sexual abuse of babies and young children. Some of the images found included the torture and murder of babies as young as only a few days old.
When Beale was arrested police found sections of files containing thousands of videos and violent assaults as well as internet addresses of more than 300 alleged paedophiles.
The reduction of the sentence was met with outrage among children’s rights groups.
“We at Women and Men Against Child Abuse vehemently opposed any consideration of appeal for Beale. The South African judiciary needs to wake up, ” said WMACA Advocacy spokesman Joanne Barrett.
“The courts need to realise that these are real children and that by downloading these images and videos, they are fuelling the market child pornography and he took two years to obtain 19,000 pieces of material.
“One must remember, these are images of young babies and children who were sadistically sexually abused and murdered. Those children who survived this horrific ordeal had no mercy shown to them and there is nothing anyone can do to take this harrowing nightmare away, ever.”
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