They're Just Better Than You...

Cambridge University is allowing an academic to keep his job despite a conviction for possessing sickening pornographic images of children.

Disgraceful! Still, I suppose it's good of them to offer a job to an ex-jailbird. Although are his academic credentials still valid after his lengthy prison ter...

Oh:

But he was controversially spared jail last month and has been told he can return to work in April.

Given that 30 images were in the most serious 'level five' category of pornography and other images involved babies as young as two days, the kind of offence that got Chris Langham a well-deserved 10 months in prison (not that he served that long, naturally...), how can this be?

Hammond is a fellow and former student at Gonville and Caius.

Alumni of the college, which was founded in 1348, include physicist Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, who helped discover the structure of DNA, and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke.

The only answer can possibly be that the court considers him far, far more important than a mere actor...

Judge Gareth Hawkes-worth, who graduated from Cambridge, told Hammond he was a sorely damaged individual who could be rehabilitated.

'During this period you were suffering from moderate depression and you were seeking refuge from life in a halcyon part of your youth, relived by looking at low-level images of boys, often in swimming clothes,' he said.

'But viewing this material can become addictive and if you had not been interrupted there would have been a serious risk that your voyeurism may have turned into action.'

So, that's all right then....