A 34-year-old Burnaby resident has been sentenced to 26 months in prison after police found thousands of child sexual abuse images on his electronic devices.
On March 1, 2019, police got reports of suspected child sexual abuse material being uploaded to the internet, according to agreed facts presented in Vancouver provincial court Tuesday (March 1).
An investigation led them to the IP address of Sean David Mcintyre, Crown prosecutor Alan Ip told the court.
When police executed a search warrant on Mcintyre’s Burnaby home on June 26, 2019, they found electronic devices capable of accessing the internet – something Mcintyre was banned from doing because he was still on a probation order related to an earlier conviction for possessing and distributing child sexual abuse images.
Mcintyre was arrested for breaching his probation, and police seized a number of the electronic devices.
Ip said police seized two laptops, one cell phone and a number of SD cards from Mcintyre's home and found between 15,000 and 20,000 videos and photos on them, depicting girls as young as four years old being sexually exploited by adult men.
Ip noted Mcintyre’s devices were also equipped with a data scrubbing program and MEGA, a New Zealand-based cloud storage and file hosting service that has been used to share child sexual abuse images.
Mcintyre pleaded guilty on Nov. 15, 2021 to one count each of possessing child pornography and breaching his probation.
As part of his submissions, Ip cited a 2020 B.C. provincial court ruling by Judge G. Koturbash, who said using “child pornography” for child sexual abuse materials dilutes the true meaning of what the images represent.
“The term pornography reinforces the conception that what it occurring is a consensual and mutual experience because the viewer is actor,” states the ruling. “These are not actors. It is not consensual. These are images of child sexual abuse.”
Defence lawyer Mark Swarz noted Mcintyre, who is originally from Langley, has the support of his mother and girlfriend, who were in court during his sentencing, but that he is an “outcast” in his father’s eyes.
Judge Reginald Harris ruled the proposed 26-month federal prison sentence was an appropriate one.
He noted the “tremendous volumes” of images on Mcintyre’s devices and the fact that previous provincial jail terms and probation orders had “not been successful in curtailing his activities.”
Besides the prison sentence, Mcintyre was also put under a lifetime Sex Offender Information Registration Act order.
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