All cached?

The Dom Post reports:

A Wellington judge has told a doctor appearing on child exploitation charges that he was “extremely sad” to sentence him because there was a worldwide shortage in his profession.

Wellington trainee radiologist Andrew Jeremy Dunkley, 35, was sentenced in Wellington District Court yesterday on six charges of possessing objectionable publications after police discovered 50,000 images on his computer.

Dunkley’s house was raided in September and his computer seized after a tip-off that resulted from an international police operation.

Crown prosecutor Alice McCobbin-Howell said Dunkley had admitted to police that he had been accessing images of children on the internet for the past 10 years.

The international investigation had led to three children in Britain being identified and removed from sexually abusive homes, she said.

“The children depicted in the images are real children and this is not victimless offending.”

Defence lawyer Greg King said the 50,000 images had not been downloaded and stored but accumulated on the computer’s cache after visiting websites.

No jail when you have 50,000 child porn images is getting off lightly. Now if it was true that he had never deliberately downloaded them, but they were just all cached images, that could explain such a light sentence.

But how credible is it? Let us say that each image is 100 KB. So to have 50,000 images in your cache, the cache would need to be at 5 GB – and that is if you had not looked at any other sites.