A man who used to work as a children’s ski club coach and run bike camps for kids in North Vancouver has been sent to jail for four months after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
Provincial judge Bryce Dyer handed the prison sentence to Marlowe Ryan Daniel Northcott, 32, in North Vancouver provincial court Monday after Northcott admitted to downloading 99 photos and 19 videos containing child pornography from a peer-to-peer file-sharing network between May and July 2015.
The images and videos showed sexual acts between children, and between children and adults. Most of the children depicted were pre-pubescent boys, Crown counsel Grace Oh told the judge. Some of the children appeared to be between four and 10 years old. The mandatory minimum sentence for possession of child pornography is 90 days in jail.
Dyer rejected a request from defence lawyer Joel Whysall to allow Northcott to serve the jail sentence on weekends, saying that would “send a wrong message to the public.”
“It is not a victimless crime,” said the judge, adding people who view such images feed “the worldwide market for child pornography.”
Northcott was flagged when his computer’s IP address came to the attention of the RCMP’s child exploitation unit during an online investigation. Police later executed a search warrant at Northcott’s North Vancouver home, seizing his computer. He was arrested the same day.
Information online described Northcott’s involvement in running bike camps for children and his coaching of kids aged six to 12 for the Mount Seymour Ski Club.
In court, Northcott’s defence lawyer asked for leniency, saying his client has no criminal record, is remorseful and has sought counselling to understand his actions.
Northcott was himself sexually abused as a child and may have been trying to “normalize” his own experiences in viewing the images, he suggested.
Psychological reports concluded Northcott is not a pedophile and is a “relative low risk” to reoffend. Whysall said going to jail for a period of months would be a “traumatic experience” for Northcott.
But the judge agreed with Oh that a sentence longer than the minimum was needed to “make it abundantly clear to the public that offences involving child pornography are very serious.”
After he is released from jail, Northcott will serve 18 months’ probation with conditions not to possess pornography, not to use an electronic device to access the Internet except for work, to provide his Internet Service Provider account to the probation office and consent to the RCMP examining his Internet search history. Northcott is also banned from working or volunteering with children, and attending parks and recreation centres where children are likely to be, except with an adult who has been advised of his conviction.
