Child-porn teacher avoids jail

Former Brighton Grammar teacher John Newton Hewitt escaped an immediate jail term after pleading guilty to downloading and possessing child pornography.

Hewitt, 49, of Knoxfield, was imprisoned for 18 months but released on the order that he be of good behaviour for a period of two years and pay a $10,000 bond.

County Court judge Frank Gucciardo said that the children depicted in the pornographic images Hewitt downloaded were the victims of his crime.

"If people such as you don't try to download these depraved pictures there will be fewer abused children," he said.

The County Court heard earlier this week that Hewitt, who used words such as "pre-teen Lolita" to scour the internet for child pornography, was a broken man whose reputation was in tatters.

He was about to take up a senior position at Scotch College when the Australian Federal Police swooped last year.

Prosecutor Krista Breckweg told Judge Frank Gucciardo earlier this week that the AFP acted on a tip-off from the Austrian Interpol, which had been alerted when Hewitt downloaded child pornography from an Austrian website.

Police seized a laptop from his home that contained 266 images and 155 videos, including young girls having sex with men and other children, children aged between 10 and 15 years old using sex toys, and videos of children aged 10 to 14 years in naked poses, she said.

Hewitt had searched for images using keywords including "underage girls", "pre-teen Lolita" and "naked pre-teen sex" and "illegal pre-teen pix".

He downloaded a program called "Historykill" to delete images from his computer's cache, Ms Breckweg said.

In a police interview Hewitt admitted to being "titillated' by the images but said he did not pass them on to other people.

Defence lawyer John Dickinson said Hewitt had led an "exemplary" life before these offences. "Whatever punishment this court inflicts will pale into the shadows because of the punishment he will continue to feel for the rest of his life."

He said Hewitt's career was over, his ex-wife had no contact with him and he had seen his three sons, aged nine to 18, on only three occasions in the past eight months.

Judge Gucciardo said it was hard to accept that someone with Hewitt's experience as a teacher would not reflect on the true nature of child pornography.

The Reverend Brian Porter, the chaplain at Brighton Grammar, said: "He has lost just about everything and now he faces an enormous challenge to discover his true nature."