A convicted sex offender with a compulsive inclination towards viewing photographs of young girls has been incarcerated once more.
On November 17, detectives discovered one damaged laptop and another operational however concealed during their visit to Andrew Boyce’s residence in Oxford. He is 44 years old.
Neither individual had registered with the police, constituting a violation of a sexual harm prevention order initially enacted following his 2016 conviction for possessing obscene photos of children.
Prosecutor Stefan Weidmann told Oxford Crown Court this week that the internet history for the past ‘several months’ had been deleted from the working laptop.
Both computers had been sent away for analysis by digital forensics specialists. Police were yet to crack into either device.
When he was interviewed at the police station Boyce ‘exercised his right to silence’, the prosecutor said.
Boyce, of Abingdon Road, Oxford, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court last month to two counts of breaching his sexual harm prevention order.
The court heard he had a previous conviction from 2020 for flouting the order. On that occasion he had accessed literature describing child abuse and had also searched the net for a 10-year-old character from the Game of Thrones television series. He was jailed for 16 months.
Mitigating on Tuesday morning, Gareth James said his client was ‘realistic’ about his fate and knew he should have told the police about the laptop.
“He’s a gentleman who seems to suffer from the ill effects of depression and mental health conditions,” the advocate said.
Sentencing him to two years’ imprisonment, Judge Michael Gledhill KC said: “I’m not going to lecture you about your dishonesty and your lying to the police.
“I’ve read the pre-sentence report with very great care. I understand the difficulties that you have faced over the years.
“None of them amount to any sort of excuse for breaching a court order designed to protect young girls from your attentions.
“You have an unhealthy appetite for looking at images of young girls.”
The judge added: “I can’t do anything else than send you to prison yet again.
“Regrettably that means the help you need is probably not going to be given in the amount it would be if you were at liberty.”
He warned Boyce that, on his release from prison, the police ‘will be keeping the closest possible eye on you’.
The judge extended the defendant’s sexual harm prevention order, replicating the terms of the earlier order and imposing it for 10 years from the date of his sentence.
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