An Oban man caught with hundreds of thousands of indecent images of children was jailed for 14 months yesterday, to “mark the revulsion of society”.
When police raided Lliam Martin’s home they found more than 750,000 files.
Officers worked for eight months sorting and categorising the sickening images, but they eventually had to give up on 600,000 of them because they reached the legal timebar for dealing with the case.
Martin, 34, of Dungallan Terrace, was also placed on the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years.
Sentencing him at Oban Sheriff Court, Sheriff Ruth Anderson QC told Martin: “In my view there is only one disposal which is appropriate here to mark what I think can properly be called the revulsion of society in respect of what you have been doing.
“I have viewed some of these images as I always do when I sentence someone in your position, so that I can say I have looked at what you have been looking at.”
He had previously pleaded guilty to possessing indecent photographs of children at his home between November 2008 and June last year.
His house was raided on June 21 after police received “sensitive intelligence”.
Fiscal Eoin McGinty previously told the court that in total there were 168,800 still images and 40 moving images. These were discovered on SD cards, a MacBook laptop and a computer unit.
Two people were working full-time between June and March on this single case and police did not have the time or resources to categorise the remaining 597,000 images.
The court previously heard that the images ranged from category A, the most severe level, to category C, the least severe.
Solicitor Simon Collins said that the majority of the images, 148,000, were category C, 14,200 category B and 11,400 category A.
Mr Collins said: “He has accepted from 2008 he started to download images from a file sharing site.
“There were breaks in the times when he would seek to download images. Nothing was downloaded between 2010 and 2014. This was an example of his attempts to deal with his problem.”
He said that Martin’s interest was not in the category A images, but in the category C images, and added that Martin had a tendency to hoard things, suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.