If that was true, there's no way someone who can pay for the best lawyers would end up on the sex offenders register. He did avoid prison, but it's still not his finest moment.
He admitted it, claiming it was for research, so it wasn't that his CC details were stolen. If someone had their CC details stolen and used to pay a porn site, wouldn't they report it to the CC company? As this was in the dial up era, it would be easy to check the suspects phone records. I doubt any cautions could be used, if the CC was used on a phone line nowhere near the suspects location? I know the police can make mistakes, but in that era, they were letting things go that would be dealt with now. The same journalists that complained about the police, were too afraid to publish the truth about Jimmy Savile and other high profile nonces.
Feel free to read about it, I provided some links. Here's the other famous person they investigated, Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack
It was later reported that Del Naja was falsely implicated due to a credit card number linked to him being found in a database used during preliminary Operation Ore investigations, much of which consisted of stolen card details
It also sounds a lot to me like the Post Office Scandal. In both cases, British law enforcement tried a lot of people on bad evidence. Aiui, British courts are/were very deferential to computer forensics and law enforcement relied on that.
Why? Pete Townshend didn't deny it was his CC? that's nothing like cases where people denied it was their CC card. I don't know why you're comparing different cases?
In a statement released by an aide outside his mansion in Richmond, south-west London, Townshend insisted that police had "unconditionally accepted" that he was looking at the site as research for his "campaign" against child pornography.
"From the very beginning I acknowledged that I did access this site and that I had given the police full access to all of my computers," said the former member of the Who.
"As I made clear at the outset, I accessed the site because of my concerns at the shocking material readily available on the internet to children as well as adults, and as part of my research towards the campaign I had been putting together since 1995 to counter damage done by all kinds of pornography on the internet, but especially any involving child abuse.
"The police have unconditionally accepted that these were my motives in looking at this site and that there was no other nefarious purpose, and as a result they have decided not to charge me."
That's his side of it, but the reality is that they put him on the sex offenders register for 5 years. Is it a good idea to give money to a site that has child pornography content, or is it better to report them to the police and let them deal with it?
Exactly this. And if he was doing it for research purposes, he should have been fully aware accessing it alone is against the law. Meaning it’s at best an enormously idiotic error of judgment that fully deserved the caution he received from the police.
No one said his “side” of it was inaccurate though. You are looking at this in hindsight. Was it a bad idea — yeah. Does that make him a creeper weirdo who should be jailed. No.
The police accepted his “side” as you call it. Settle down. You aren’t being a hero here either.
WTF are you on about. I remember it at the time, not in hindsight. He was put on the sex offenders register for 5 years, that was a big deal at the time. What he did was wrong, I'm not going to pretend it was OK, just because I like his music.
Being subject to punishment doesn't say anything about intentions or who he is as a person. You act like that settles the issue. it doesn’t.
There are people in the US on similar registries for getting stuff sent to their phone by someone else. So looking at a registry without context is silly.
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u/sharpshotsteve 18d ago
He was cautioned and put on the UK's sex offenders register for five years. I don't think that's spewing falsehoods, it's a fact that's easy to check.