Uni Employee Caught with CHILD PORN
Ex-Soton Uni employee convicted after being caught with indecent images of children.
A former University of Southampton employee has been sentenced to an 8 month suspended prison sentence for 2 years after pleading guilty of possessing 762 images of CHILD PORN and making indecent images of a child.
Michael Francis Axford, a former ECS postgraduate student who had worked for iSolutions and was a projectionist for Union Films, has been sentenced by Southampton Crown Court. Axford will be on a Sex Offenders Treatment Programme for 2 years and a supervision requirement also for 2 years. He is bound by the Sex Offenders Notification requirement for 10 years. Mr Axford is barred from having contact with children and must handover his internet history when requested by a police officer.
At the sentencing, Mr Axford appeared calm and compliant. The judge, Her Honour Judge Evans QC, kept Axford out of prison as she felt that the “socially-inept” and “shy” 32-year old would not pose a danger to the public. His guilty plea and willingness to co-operate also counted in his favour.
Axford had posed as a 14 year-old girl called Sarah in internet chatrooms. Amongst his vile collection were images ranging from levels 1 to 8 out of 10 on the official police scale of severity. The children in the images were aged from 2 to 16 years old.
The Tab was contacted by an anonymous source informing us of allegations last month after the initial trial. We contacted the University for a statement and they declined to comment, only saying:
Under our data protection policy, we cannot confirm or deny any of these allegations.
But when informed of the charges a colleague at Union Films told The Tab:
He’s really friendly and keen to help and I am shocked to hear the allegations. He’s single and always on his laptop but I would never have thought he’d have sink that low.
CORRECTION 14/07/12: A suspended sentence of eight and half years was falsely reported and has been updated to show the correct sentence of eight months suspended for two years. 762 images were found, not nearly 17,000 – however many were duplicates.
We apologise to Mr Axford and his legal team as well as our readers for our mistakes, these have now been rectified.