A convicted sex offender has been jailed after buying a busted iPad from Curry’s and logging onto library computers to use Excel.
Alan Thompson’s offending was uncovered when police were called to the Curry’s shop in Didcot after a disagreement between the 56-year-old and staff over the faulty iPad he had bought in May.
The officers arrived at the store to sort out the dispute, only to realise that a court order prohibited Thompson from having the iPad in the first place unless his supervising police officers knew about it – which they did not.
He was also found to have been using the computers at Abingdon Library, logging on under an alias ‘Andrew Thompson’ on June 24, June 26 and July 7.
READ MORE: Breach of court order denied - Thompson's trial in February
Mitigating, Tamasin Graham said: “When the police arrived and found him there on July 7, what he was doing on that computer was using the programme Excel. He had a spreadsheet open on the computer before him.”
She asked the judge to bear in mind that the iPad was broken, which was the reason why he was taking it back to Curry’s, so he would have been unable to use it to access the internet.
The offences came just three months after Thompson was given a six month suspended prison sentence by a judge at Oxford Crown Court for breaching the same sexual harm prevention order.
He had been seen on CCTV in the lobby of a hotel where he was then staying walking with two young people who were known to him.
While the parent of the boy was aware of the fact Thompson was a registered sex offender, who was jailed for five years in 2008 in Reading, the mother of the girl seen in the footage was unaware of the man’s criminal past.
During the trial in February, the defendant’s brief James Hay asked the girl’s mum: “He said to you: ‘I’m on the sex offender register as a convicted sex offender.’”
She replied: “No, he never told me nothing.”
READ MORE: Six month suspended sentence for hotel lobby court order breach
On Friday (August 4), Thompson, of Ashgate, Abingdon, admitted that the latest breaches of his sexual harm prevention order put him in breach of the suspended prison sentence.
In mitigation, it was said that the defendant had been struggling in recent times with depression. He expressed a willingness to work with the probation service.
Sending him to prison for 15 months, Judge Michael Gledhill KC said: “It seems to me you knew perfectly well what you could and could not do by way of accessing the internet, but you decided you were above the law and could do exactly what you wanted.”
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