Penticton man found guilty of possessing child sexual abuse imagery

Photo: Castanet

A Penticton man has been found guilty of child pornography possession after unsuccessfully arguing there was no direct evidence connecting him to the images and activity on his electronic devices.

Christopher Donald Vern Davis, born in 1990, was found guilty on Tuesday in Penticton Provincial Court.

Judge Michelle Daneliuk said that 369 images, some of which were duplicates, meeting the Canada Criminal Code definition of child pornography, as well as one video, were found to have been on Davis' cellphone or tablet between December 2019 and June 2020.

Twitter accounts registered using that same cellphone number and tied to Davis' IP address in Penticton in late 2019 and early 2020 were shut down due to complaints about the nature of messages and content being shared and accessed, including images meeting the definition of child pornography.

Daneliuk noted that some of the images were animated, and did not involve real children.

Multiple witnesses who lived at the same address at the time testified during Davis' trial, and confirmed Davis was "not seen without his phone in his possession" and told others not to use his phone.

"No one else was allowed to use the phone and in fact, no one else was seen by any of the witnesses to use it, and [Davis spent] lengthy periods of time alone in the storage area that served as his room, and he always had his phone with him," Daneliuk said.

"While it is notionally conceivable that another person could obtain access to accounts on this phone, or the phone itself by hacking into accounts, based on the expert evidence from [police], to draw such an inference in this case would be speculative."

Davis will return to court at a later date to hear his sentence, after a pre-sentence report and psychological or psychiatric report have been completed.