A U.S. sailor caught with hundreds of images of child pornography while his ship was docked in North Vancouver has been sent to jail for 18 months.
Henry Carlton Sheppard, 25, of Seattle, was arrested Sept. 6 after Canadian Border Services officers boarded the vessel Global Sentinel and found the child pornography on a laptop in Sheppards cabin.
Officers examined an external hard drive and found 500 still photos and 50 videos, all containing explicit images of girls between five and 10 having sex with adult men.
Sheppard told officers how he was able to access the pornography through a hidden relay system of websites that allowed him to browse the images without being detected.
He said he first became interested in depictions of child pornography though Asian comic books. Those depictions got him interested in looking for the real stuff he told psychologists who interviewed him.
Sheppard was sentenced Oct. 27 in North Vancouver provincial court after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography.
In handing down her sentence, Judge Carol Baird Ellan said she was concerned that Sheppards interest in child porn was apparently a longstanding habit and about his lack in insight into the harm associated with it.
Even accessing such images from the Internet creates a market for more, she told Sheppard.
She added Sheppard was lucky he was caught in Canadian waters rather than in the U.S., where sentences are harsher.
Crown counsel Gillian Parson noted Sheppard will likely be deported back to the U.S. once hes served his sentence.
jseyd@nsnews.com
