Former Mansfield Woodhouse teacher found with child porn on his phone

Fraser McDonald Smith appeared before Nottingham Magistrates’ Court on Friday, April 30, where a district judge said that he had insufficient sentencing powers to deal with the 63-year-old.

Police raided McDonald Smith’s Edgehill Grove home in February last year where they recovered one Category A – the most extreme – video and five Category B videos from his mobile phone and a hard drive, the court was told.

Prosecuting, Stella Moses told the court: “Police attended his address after they received information via an email. He was at home and appeared shocked when they arrived.

“He had been chatting to a 14-year-old male on a site called Grindr and officers subsequently seized a mobile phone and USB hard drive.

“He accepts that there was pornography on the devices, but he says he didn’t know how the child pornography got there.”

McDonald Smith, who has a previous child porn offence dating back to 2005, admitted two counts of making an indecent image of a child when he appeared before the court at an earlier hearing in March.

Mitigating, Freddie Sail told the court: “These images date back to 2015 and he admits that he does have an addiction to adult pornography but doesn’t know how the child porn got onto these devices.

“There is no evidence that he was actively searching for child pornography, because if he was there would have been a plethora of images on these devices.”

McDonald Smith will be sentenced on May 21.

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