An Invermay man's sexual abuse as a child directly contributed to his child pornography offences, a Supreme Court Judge said in Launcestron.
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Justice Robert Pearce made the comments in sentencing Jess Elijah Hall to a 12 month home detention order and a twelve month jail sentence, which was suspended on a $2000 recognisance and the condition that he be of good behaviour.
Hall will be placed on the sex offender register for five years.
He said a psychiatrist's report said there was a causal link between Hall's disordered sexual thoughts and the sexual, physical and psychological abuse he suffered as a child which had also caused post traumatic stress disorder.
Mr Hall, 31, pleaded guilty to one count of using a carriage service to access child exploitation material under the Commonwealth Criminal Code and three counts of possession of child exploitation material of the Tasmanian Criminal Code between February 23 and March 4, 2015.
The court heard that Hall was caught in possession of child pornography after an FBI investigation of a specialist website led to a tip-off to the Australian Federal Police.
The website Playpen was dedicated to accessing and exchanging child exploitation material.
Playpen is located on a network, known as Tor, which disguises the true internet protocol addresses of users through the use of a special browser.
In February 2015, the FBI identified the physical location of servers hosting Playpen inside the United States.
"The FBI executed a search warrant and seized control of Playpen," Crown prosecutor Jayne Ansell said in the plea hearing.
The FBI conducted live monitoring of Playpen and used an investigative technique to reveal the true IP addresses of individual users."
Hall's IP address was identified on March 2, 2015. It found he had accessed the network seven times over the 11-day period from February 23 to March 4 on his laptop.
He added information "Watch out Playpen newbie here" to the personal text tab of the site.
"The accused accessed 669 threads [conversations], 23 different forums within Playpen site while it was under the control of the FBI," Ms Ansell said. "The total time logged was 22 hours and 40 minutes."
The material predominantly depicted about 30 different female victims aged between toddler and mid-teen.
"The range of activity depicted included sexually suggestive poses to penetrative acts with adults, predominantly adult males."
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