Man guilty of child porn charges

Brewer was released on conditional bail

A Devon man whose conviction for flying to the US to have sex with a child was overturned, has been found guilty of possessing child porn.

Police found four indecent photographs of children on a computer disk at the flat of John Brewer, 41, after being alerted by the US authorities.

Brewer, currently at a Cornish bail hostel, had denied all the charges.

On Friday he was convicted of four counts of making indecent pictures of children and one of possessing them.

Denied knowledge

Janet Cambridge, chairman of the bench at Plymouth Magistrates Court, ordered the case be sent to the crown court for sentencing and released Brewer on conditional bail.

Prosecutor Eoin MacCarthy told magistrates that Devon and Cornwall Police obtained a search warrant on 16 January last year to assist their US colleagues.

The same day officers from the force's paedophile unit broke into Brewer's then-home at Fairview Avenue, Plymouth, and searched the flat.

They seized the defendant's computer from his bedroom along with CD-Roms and floppy disks, which were all later analysed.

On one of the disks were found four indecent images of a child, Mr MacCarthy said.

In June 2004 a US jury found Brewer guilty of aggravated sexual abuse for flying to America to have sex with a six-year-old girl.

'Dragged through the mud'

But on 9 September, while he was in jail awaiting a sentence of up to 30 years, his conviction was dismissed and he was deported to the UK.

He was arrested by Devon and Cornwall Police over the child porn images 11 days later.

Brewer told Plymouth Magistrates on Friday: "I came back to my life that had been ruined to be dragged through the mud again."

When he was interviewed by police he said he had never seen the photographs before and denied knowledge of how they came to be on the disk.

Det Con Stewart Bergman, from Devon and Cornwall Police's hi-tech crime unit, told the court one of the photographs was rated at level four, on a sliding scale with level five the most serious, and three others at level one.

Further examination of Brewer's computer found evidence the images had been copied from the hard drive onto the floppy disk, he said.

After returning to Britain, Brewer said he was seeking legal action over his treatment in the US and insisted he had "no sexual feelings" towards children.