Gustavo Nuno Patricio Leirinha (19), of Les Cinq Chênes, was sentenced to 120 hours of community service and 12 months’ probation and placed on the Sex Offenders Register for a minimum of five years after pleading guilty to the charges.
Police started to investigate Leirinha as a result of a JEP ‘sting’, when journalists posed as a 14-year-old girl on the online dating site Badoo to catch men interested in young girls.
However, no charges resulted directly from the exchanges with the journalists.
Two charges related to the defendant talking online in 2015 to people he believed were 15-year-old girls on the social media app Kik.
Leirinha persuaded one girl to send him a ‘live picture’ of her breasts. He also tried to incite a second girl to do the same but she refused. He was also sentenced for possessing 137 indecent images of under-18s.
The Magistrate’s Court heard that he was a first offender who had expressed ‘disgust’ at his own ‘sick’ behaviour and had been co-operative with the police.
In sentencing, Assistant Magistrate Peter Harris, said: ‘They are matters which disgust all right-thinking members of society.’
But he said the court could take the route of not imposing a custodial sentence due to the age of the defendant at the time of the offences.
