Article content

An RCMP officer who was caught with child pornography files on his homebuilt, heavily encrypted computer will face sentencing next week.

At his trial in Prince Albert in October, Const. Aiden Arthur Pratchett denied downloading the child porn files, which showed young girls being victimized by adult men, onto his computer. The judge didn’t believe him.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or RCMP officer guilty of child porn charges after cops spend five days trying to access encrypted computer Back to video

In his decision, delivered Wednesday in Saskatoon provincial court, Judge Morris Baniak said the notion that Pratchett would be unaware of someone hacking into his computer — on which he admitted monitoring bandwidth usage and installing encryption software — was “without merit” and “fanciful.”

“There is no evidentiary foundation for the presence of the child pornography on his computer other than that the accused was responsible for it being there,” Baniak said.

Pratchett was stationed at the Fond du Lac detachment, 800 kilometres north of Saskatoon, when his IP address was flagged by the Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit’s monitoring system in the fall of 2014. The IP address was traced to his home in a duplex on the grounds of the detachment.