Sentence on musician who downloaded porn delayed

A musician who held hundreds of indecent and pornographic images of children on a memory stick had sentence deferred when he appeared in court this week.

Alan Scollay, 51, had previously admitted possessing the USB stick at his home in Gott and on board an inter-island ferry from Toft to Ulsta in Yell between 3rd March and 7th June 2007.

Sentence had been deferred when Scollay appeared in March in order for social inquiry reports and a psychological assessment to be compiled, but the latter has still to be completed, meaning he will not now be sentenced until 6th May.

It is also to be arranged for Sheriff Graeme Napier to view a representative selection of the 693 images before deciding on Scollay’s sentence.

The memory stick was unwittingly discovered by a council employee working on the MV Daggri  ferry, who found it beneath one of the passenger seats on 7th June 2007. He looked at its contents to see if they could give any clue as to its rightful owner, before handing it into the police.

Having initially denied owning the memory stick, Scollay admitted in a police interview that he had accidentally left it on the ferry and confessed that he had taken to downloading the images in late 2006.

Scollay claimed that he had been unable to stop himself viewing the images even though he was “consciously disgusted” by them. He said he had drifted into child pornography due to marriage problems and stress at work, but denied getting any sexual gratification from viewing the pictures.

Some 307 of the images are of post-pubescent and 386 of pre-pubescent children, with one of the pictures rated as being in the most serious category and 116 of them ranked in the second most serious category.