Kelowna man sentenced to house arrest, curfew for child porn convictions

Warning: This story discusses the details of a child pornography investigation and details may be triggering to some readers.

A Kelowna man who collected pictures of children in sexually compromising positions and discussed it online was sentenced last month to house arrest.

For possessing and distributing child pornography in 2018, Judge Andrew Tam ruled Mark Keenan would serve two years less a day for the distribution offence and a concurrent conditional sentence of 18 months for the possession offence.

The first 18 months will be served by house arrest and the remainder will be served with a 6 p.m. curfew. Additionally, Keenan will be on probation for 12 months.

In a court decision published Monday, Tam said Keenan came to the attention of police by way of his Tumblr account, where images suspected to be child pornography were uploaded in his name.

“They alerted the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) who in turn alerted the RCMP,” Tam said in the decision.

“After an investigation into the holder of the account, the police executed a search warrant at Keenan’s residence.”

Tam said the forensic analysis of Keenan’s electronic devices that followed revealed that he had accessed six images between Sept. 10 and 30, 2018 that met the definition of “child pornography”. “These images depicted boys between the apparent ages of 9 to 16,” Tam said.

“These victims were essentially naked and the images focussed on their genitals."

Interactions of a sexual nature were also involved.

Tumblr permits its users to post blogs and communicate via messages among users and in the forensic analysis of Keenan’s account police found a series of conversations between Keenan and other users.

“In these messages, there was reference to Keenan posting a blog, the content of which focussed on sexual activities with children,” Tam said.

“The people with whom Keenan communicated were mostly adults, but there was one user who represented himself as a 15 year-old boy. These messages included Keenan describing sexual activities, both penetrative and non-penetrative, between adults and children.”

The content of these messages form the basis of the distribution charge.

Keenan pleaded guilty to the offences, but said he has “no sexual interest in children.”

“Rather, he came upon child pornography images innocently while he was searching for other images such as sunsets and beaches,” Tam said.

“When he came upon these images, he was appalled and wanted to signal the problem to Tumblr. He set out to post a blog, with the hopes of luring out paedophiles who may be lurking on the internet. He communicated with them in this fashion in order to gain their trust, so that they would be dealt with by the moderator.”

Undertaking his own “undercover sting” is a version of events he’s stood by since his 2018 arrest, Tam said.

It wasn’t one that Tam put much weight in, noting that the conversations he had with people were “unnecessarily graphic,” and “at odds with detecting and banning paedophiles from the website.”

Lastly, “the most damning evidence” came from Keenan’s own mouth when he was arrested.

At that time he gave a statement to police and when asked if he was aroused by the images, Tam said he replied "I mean, in a way, it’s hard not to be," adding that he did not want to see anything bad happen to children.

“It may well be that each single element has an innocent explanation,” Tam said.

“But considering the totality of the circumstances, this Court concludes, on a balance of probabilities, that Mr. Keenan possessed these images, and had those Tumblr exchanges for a sexual purpose. This is by far the more likely explanation.”

Thus, Tam rejected the proposition that Keenan committed these offences for the public good.

He did, however, feel that Keenan had demonstrated the ability to be law abiding in the time that’s passed since his 2018 arrest.

“I am satisfied that allowing Keenan to serve his sentence in the community would not pose an undue risk to public safety seeing that he has been at large for the last 6.5 years without incident,” Tam wrote.

“The Court concludes that a conditional sentence of sufficient duration, with significant punitive sanctions, would not be inconsistent with the principles of sentencing. It places the required weight on deterrence and denunciation, while striking a proper balance with the other principles including that of proportionality.”