Teacher admits child porn charge

A teacher who formerly worked at a County Antrim grammar school has been given a one year suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to charges linked to computer child pornography.

Herbert Karl Murray from The Close, in the Oldpark Road area of Ballymena was sentenced at Antrim Magistrates Court on Friday.

The 55-year-old teacher had admitted two charges of posting indecent images of children on the internet, and 10 charges of downloading child pornography from the internet.

The court heard that when computers were seized from Murray's home, experts found more then 140 indecent images stored on them.

Some of the photographs involved very young children.

Murray was sacked from his job as a physics teacher at Ballymena Academy after pleading guilty to the charges.

The judge accepted that there had been no breach of trust as no pornographic material had been found at the school, and that Karl Murray and his family had already suffered severe financial and social consequences.

He imposed a one year jail term for each offence - to run simultaneously and to be suspended for two years.

He also ordered that Murray's details be kept on the sex offenders register for two years.