Yellowknife man found guilty of possessing child porngraphy

A Yellowknife man has been found guilty of possessing child pornography. 

Russ Jones stood with no emotion on his face as Justice Shannon Smallwood delivered her verdict in the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories on Thursday morning.

Smallwood spent close to an hour explaining her decision, going over the evidence and the witness testimony that had been presented in court — including the fact Jones knowingly had thousands of images of child pornography on several computer towers, an external hard drive and internal hard drive. 

Jones was living alone at the time of arrest, with a computer exclusively in his control, the court heard.

He was charged in 2020 after a lengthy investigation with RCMP and its Integrated Child Exploitation unit. The investigation led to finding more than 5,000 images of child pornography. 

'Innocent possession'

During the three-day judge-only trial in September, defence attorney Jay Bran suggested Jones was in "innocent possession" of the images after accidentally stumbling across a photo of a naked child on a beach while trying to find a computer wallpaper background in 2016.

During the trial, the defence said Jones saved the images to prove he was not on child pornography sites, but that the images kept showing up during searches and suggested searches on the Bing search engine. Jones alleged he was saving the images to "prove that Microsoft was running a child pornography search engine." 

Bran acknowledged during the trial that Jones knew he had the images on his computer but argued Jones never intentionally searched for child pornography.

Jones didn't delete photos or alert police

The Crown provided six sample images from the thousands found on Jones' devices during the trial. Justice Smallwood said all the images were of female children that were mostly or completely naked, and the focal points of those images had been on the breast or genital area.

"Some [of the girls] are clearly under the age of 10," Smallwood said.

During the decision, Smallwood said the innocent possession defence did not hold up for a number of reasons — including the fact Jones would save an image and then access it months later.

Smallwood also noted Jones did not take actions to delete the photos, alert the police to the search engine issue or switch search engines.

Part of the defence had been that the majority of images were from suggested searches on Bing, meaning Jones did not directly search the images. But Judge Smallwood said it didn't matter how the images were found — the fact the images were found and saved for years is "not the action of someone seeking to avoid child pornography."

A date for the sentencing hearing will be set in the new year.