In September last year, James John Matthews (43), who had worked at St John’s Primary School for nearly 20 years, was sent to prison for two years and nine months after pleading guilty to possessing indecent images of children and sending obscene messages.
The conviction followed a police investigation in which officers seized 23 devices from Matthews’ home in December 2019. Experts later recovered 33 images – one of which was a video – from the deleted area of Matthews’ computer’s hard disc. The images ranged from a baby to a 14-year-old. None were pupils at the school. The officers also discovered that Matthews had used the internet to ‘chat’ to a locally registered sex offender.
Outlining the new case, Crown Advocate Chris Baglin, prosecuting, told the court that the charges – three of making indecent photographs of children, and two of distributing indecent photographs of children – were related to the earlier ones but were ‘of a greater magnitude’. Matthews admitted the charges.
Advocate Baglin told the court the new evidence came to light on 16 September 2020, two days before Matthews was due to be sentenced for the first offences. His ex-wife was tidying their house and discovered an iPad Pro laptop in a toy box and a time-capsule hard drive. The court was told this was a large storage device which synched up all Matthews’ devices and cached material.
The devices were sent to the UK to be examined and the time capsule was found to contain more than 2,000 stored images, although many of these were duplicates.
Advocate Baglin said that this meant the number of images was ‘no longer small’, having risen from 33 distinct images to 205, with more than half of them in the most serious category. Whereas before there had only been one video, that had now increased to ten.
Although the prosecution was critical of Matthews’ failure to tell the police about these extra devices, Advocate David Steenson, defending, told the court his client ‘had a lot on his mind at the time’ and had forgotten about them.
Advocate Steenson also criticised the police, claiming they ‘had not done their job properly’. The devices, the advocate claimed, were not hidden away in some attic space, but were in a spare room that acted as a study and storage area and were plainly in view. It was not Matthews’ fault, he added, that the police had not found them.
Advocate Steenson described his client as ‘a good person who has done very bad things’ who now viewed his life as being in ruins. This extra sentencing, the lawyer claimed, was making Matthews and his family relive their nightmare and that further adding to the defendant’s sentence ‘made no sense’.
Advocate Baglin urged the court to add another 21 months to Matthews’ sentence after the current one ended in March 2022, bringing it to a total of 4½ years. However, the court decided to add 11 months, meaning a total sentence of three years and eight months.
Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae was presiding and Jurats Rozanne Thomas, Jane Ronge and Charles Blampied were sitting.
