Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed
Lancashire PoliceA woman who accessed her "vast" library of child sexual abuse images from her hospital bed has been jailed.
Julie Marshall used public wifi to look at some of her 80,000 images as she recovered from a heart attack in August 2017, Preston Crown Court heard.
The court heard police raided the 54-year-old's home in Blackpool and seized two laptops, a phone and multiple CDs.
Marshall, who admitted three counts of making indecent images of children, was sentenced to nine months in prison.
The 54-year-old, who had no previous convictions, admitted downloading images from the internet between June 2004 and April 2018 in February.
They included 677 images of the most serious nature, known as category A images.
She had also downloaded 465 category B images and 79,958 category C images.
Passing sentence, Judge Simon Newell said the images were "vast in number".
He said Marshall's "mental health issues have been of a long-standing nature", adding: "I do not go into the detail of them, but they have run from adolescence to adult life."
"It appears to me the period of time and the volume of images can only be met by an immediate custodial sentence," he said.
Marshall was jailed for nine months for the category A images, six months for the category B images and four months for the category C images, with all sentences to run concurrently.
She was also given a 10-year notification order to sign the sex offenders register and a six-year sexual harm prevention order.
Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk