No re-trial for child porn York professor
A FORMER UNIVERSITY of York lecturer, convicted last November of 17 internet child pornography offences, will not face a retrial on child abuse allegations, a judge has ordered.
This August, a jury without knowledge of Keith Slingsby Burton’s previous convictions was unable to return a verdict on charges that Burton, 60, had indecently abused a boy in 2003.
They heard from both the boy, now a teenager, and Burton, who claimed that the two alleged incidents of sexual abuse had never happened.The jury was discharged after a day’s deliberations, and the case later returned to York Crown Court, at the prosecution’s request, when the Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Hoffman, let the charges lie on file. They will thereby be added to Burton’s criminal record, but made clear as being unproven in court, and he will not face a retrial.
Nouse reported in November of the former Department of Physics tutor’s conviction as part of Operation Sirdar, an investigation into internet child pornography launched by US authorities in 2003.
Detectives had traced Burton through the details of his credit card, which he used to access websites under investigation. Burton admitted 16 offences of making an indecent photograph of a child and one of possession of indecent photographs of children. York Crown Court heard that police found 2,445 child pornography pictures on Burton’s computer, at varying levels of the Copine Scale, used to measure pornographic content, including 21 at level four of the five-point scale.
