Carl Martin, the Pontardawe Paedophile, who organised a meeting to rape children, including a 10-month-old baby, then asserted that he merely desired the children to sit on his lap so he could recite a nursery rhyme, according to court testimony. A court described Carl Martin’s assertion as “one of the most implausible narratives I have encountered.”
Swansea Crown Court was informed that Carl Martin had conversed about arranging a meeting to exploit the minors with an individual he encountered online, whom he presumed to be their mother. He was speaking with an undercover police officer. A court stated that there exists a “very dark side” to Carl Martin when sentencing the defendant to prison.
Hannah George, prosecuting, told the court that in January this year, Carl Martin had used a name other than his own when creating an online profile – namely “Carpenter” – and had used a virtual private network and the DuckDuckGo internet browser to try to ensure his online activity was private and anonymous. She said the defendant began interacting with a profile purporting to belong to a mother with two children and said the conversation was “sexual in nature” from the beginning. She told Carl Martin and the decoy that they began discussing “play dates” and which of her children were “active,” but she said the defendant “used elusive language” so as not to implicate himself. Explicitly asked by the decoy what he wanted to do with the children, Martin said he wanted the youngsters to “sit on his lap and straddle him”. The court heard he also assured the mother that he did not want her children to suffer pain or damage.
Carl Martin, the 36-year-old defendant was arrested on February 2 this year and, in his interview, gave officers a prepared statement in which he denied the conversation with the decoy had been sexual. He was subsequently charged with arranging the commission of a child sexual offence and pleaded not guilty, and the matter went to trial.
At trial, the defendant maintained the position he had set out to police following his arrest. Carl Martin said references to a “play date” had meant them watching other people playing online computer games, said he wanted to help the woman with her children because she was a single mum, and said he was telling the decoy that he wanted the children “straddling him” had meant he wanted them to sit on a lap. At the same time, he sang a “horsey, horsey nursery rhyme”. He accepted he had wanted to meet the children but said he only had to take them to the park.
Carl Martin, of Cilmaengwyn Road, Cilmaengwyn, Pontardawe, had previously been convicted by a jury by a majority of 11 to one to two counts of arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sexual offence when he returned to the dock for sentencing. He has no previous convictions.
Fantasist defence lawyer Solomon Hartley, for Carl Martin, said a pre-sentence report before the court highlighted the childhood trauma and “adverse childhood experiences” the defendant had suffered from the age of 11. He said the conviction had already had a significant impact on the defendant, who had lost his job and his home and who had spent seven months on remand in prison in conditions which were more complex than otherwise would be the case due to the current overcrowding situation. He invited the court to find the only specific evidence of the defendant’s intentions: the reference to children sitting on his lap and straddling him. He said the court would be in the “realms of speculation” in considering what might have happened and what harm might have been caused had any meeting taken place; for the latest court reports, sign up for our crime newsletter here.
Judge Geraint Walters said the defendant had not come across the decoy account by chance but had gone looking for such interaction and had used a false name and a computer equipped with facilities for private internet searching. He said Martin had used “cagey” language when interacting with the decoy and when talking about how far he would go with the children, indicating that he realised how wrong what he was proposing. Judge Walters said the defendant had subsequently sought to explain everything in a “naïve and plainly untrue way” – such as claiming he had chosen the online name of Carpenter because he liked carpentry – and had put forward a version of events to the jury which was “about as fanciful an account as I have heard as a judge”.
The judge said having heard all the evidence in the case, it was his assessment that had Martin met the children he had been discussing online, he “would have gone as far as the mother allowed”, and that would have included penetrative acts had the mother consented. He said the author of the pre-sentence report had concluded that Martin was potentially a dangerous offender, and he told the man in the dock that he agreed with the judgement of the probation officer that “there is a very dark side to you”. Martin was sentenced to three years in prison and was made the subject of a 10-year sexual harm prevention order. He will be a registered sex offender for the next ten years, after which it is hoped that he will no longer want to rape babies…as if by magic.
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