Gregory Arthur Shuter, 71, dropped off his iMac and iPhone at the business on October 23, 2024, to have their data transferred to new devices of the same make.
However, the business called the police after finding several images depicting children in sexually suggestive poses.
Shuter picked up his new devices the next day, but the old ones were handed over to the police, who found a total of 758 images and two videos showing the material.
At Shuter’s recent sentencing in the Queenstown District Court on a charge of possessing child sexual abuse material, Judge Mark Williams said all but five of the images showed real children engaged in sexual activity.
More than 60% of the images were of children aged 12 or younger, and showed self-abuse, sexualised posing and "violent and sadistic" activity involving animals.
Judge Williams told Shuter his sentence had to reflect the "immense suffering caused by people such as yourself who create a market for images of children being sexually abused".
The defendant’s actions continued to fuel the "abhorrent demand" for this type of material.
Given such offending usually occurred in the privacy of an offender’s home and was difficult to detect, the sentence needed an element of deterrence, he said.
The pre-sentence report "did not make for easy reading", saying Shuter had no explanation for his offending, and had looked at the images "as part of your entertainment in the evenings".
The defendant told the report writer it was "unfair and ironic that four [police officers] in Dunedin get to decide how old the girls in the images are".
He had denied responsibility and repeated the excuse the images "did not specify the ages of the children".
Judge Williams said it showed Shuter had a "complete lack of insight or remorse", and a letter of remorse he had written to the court in January had a "very hollow ring" to it.
From a starting point of two years’ prison, he made deductions for Shuter’s guilty plea and lack of convictions — apart from one for speeding in 1973 — bringing it down to 15 months’ prison.
Satisfied the defendant’s home in an apartment building was "some way from children who will be walking along the pathway", and that he would be confined to that location, he converted the sentence to one of seven and a-half months’ home detention.
He also ordered that Shuter be registered as a child sex offender.
