Vic: Court to decide on teacher child porn charges
By Nick Lenaghan
MELBOURNE, Aug 8 AAP - A Melbourne magistrate will decide today whether a former primaryteacher who wrote down sexual fantasies about his students should stand trial on childporn charges.
In what is believed to be a legal first in Victoria, the 59-year-old teacher is facing47 counts including possessing and making child pornography over personal writings hekept in exercise books.
At a committal hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, his lawyer Julie Sutherlandhas conceded the descriptions of sex with under-age children was pornographic.
However, Ms Sutherland has argued the handwritten material does not fall within thecategory of "publication" as defined by the law because her client never intended his"private jottings" to become public.
Ms Sutherland said it was "ludicrous and offensive to the rights of privacy and therights of free speech" to say that her client "by privately jotting down silly, albeitpornographic, thoughts in countless exercise books for 30 years" had possessed pornographicpublications.
The court heard the primary teacher, who has since lost his job, wrote fantasies afterwork about his students in exercise books he kept at home and in a public storage unithe hired.
He also plastered on his walls non-pornographic school photos he had taken of the students.
Crown Prosecutor Michael Tinney said that under child porn laws a publication was simplydefined as any written or pictorial material.
Possessing or making child porn had nothing to do with distributing it to the public,Mr Tinney said.
Deputy chief magistrate Daniel Muling will give his decision later today.
AAP nl/szp/gfr/lb/de
KEYWORD: FANTASY
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