Reduced term for kiddie porn

A wealthy 75-year-old sexual predator has got a shorter prison sentence because of his age.

Cape Town grandfather Johannes Kleinhans was convicted of 95 child pornography charges in January 2013 after he lured pubescent girls into posing naked for him by paying their school fees, giving them access to his home gym and buying them expensive gifts.

Despite 86 of the counts carrying a minimum 10-year prison sentence, the magistrate’s court found there were “substantial and compelling circumstances” and, instead of dishing out 860 years’ imprisonment, gave a combined 10 year prison sentence for all 86 charges. It added another five-year sentence for the other charges.

Then, last week, the Cape Town High Court reduced Kleinhans’s 15-year prison sentence to an effective four years – eight years imprisonment, four suspended - because the longer sentence was not “humane” and the earlier court had “overemphasised the seriousness of the offences”.

“The sentence imposed envisages a man in his late eighties being incarcerated for sexual offences, none of which involve any significant element of physical violence or injury,” the court found.

This was despite two of the three victims attempting suicide and showing “some very disturbing consequences”, including psychological trauma, “major depression”, “rage” and bitterness.

Kleinhans pleaded guilty to a spate of charges, including sexual assault and touching the girls’ private parts.

He claimed to have been “led astray” by the girls and said his crimes had “charitable” motivations.

The high court also ordered Kleinhans to attend a 36-month sexual offenders’ programme. He is also banned from unsupervised contact with any female children, other than any of his 10 grandkids, and his details will go into the National Register for Sex Offenders.

In justifying the shorter sentence, the court found Kleinhans’s advanced age to be the “weightiest” factor. It also took into account that he was a first-time offender, had shown remorse and had suffered “public shaming”.

The court overruled the magistrate’s finding that Kleinhans had “destroyed the lives” of the girls, finding she had “exaggerated” some of her observations.

Shaheda Omar from The Teddy Bear Clinic said a lack of physical injury did not mean children were unharmed and she was not swayed by the man’s age justifying a lesser sentence.

“His age has nothing to do with it. Actions have consequences; people need to be held accountable for their behaviour and actions.”

Johannesburg psychologist Leon van Niekerk added that the courts were “bestowing ... mercy” on perpetrators, which sent the “wrong message”.

Omar said that often such offenders relapse.

This was confirmed by a psychologist who testified in the case that the “prospects of rehabilitation of sexual offenders are poor or even non-existent”. She found that Kleinhans “remained at risk for sexual re-offending”. A social worker who testified on behalf of Kleinhans also warned that there were “no guarantees for [his] recovery even if he attended [an] extensive rehabilitation programme” and that “it was not possible for him to be monitored 24 hours a day”.