The Western Cape High Court has confirmed an effective sentence of eight years in prison for a Cape Town sex offender, Clinton Calder, who possessed thousands of child pornography images. Acting Judge Colin Kahanovitz warned that this was not a crime 'to be trivialised' and ruled that despite Calder's health problems, his sentence had to stand.

Several times since his arrest, Clinton Calder (55) has described his possession of thousands of images depicting child pornography as silly, crazy and "a moment of madness".

But the pictures he had in his possession all showed the violent sexual abuse of girls. A summary of the images filled a spreadsheet of about 80 pages with roughly 40 entries per page.

At the time of his arrest, Calder was working as a broker for a courier company. He was a smoker, despite being diagnosed with a serious lung disease as well as "paedophilic disorder".

Giving evidence in mitigation of sentence, Calder described his involvement with child pornography as a "moment of madness". It lasted nine months. He said he had been doing "crazy things"; that he was currently seeing a psychologist, was suffering from depression and had suicidal thoughts.

He had been diagnosed with obstructive pulmonary disease but when he was seen by a doctor he had not stopped smoking yet.

His handle on the file-sharing network Gigatribe was Rattex69 and he used the platform to download child pornography between 23 September 2014 and 7 June 2015.

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