These are extremely serious charges. Depending if the charges are possession or distribution of child there is a 6-12 month mandatory minimum sentence (MMP) upon a finding of guilt. That means no matter what, the MMP requires the judge to give you at least that jail sentence. Maybe more. Regardless if your a doctor or your personal circumstances, you will go to jail if found guilty.
There are also many auxiliary consequences such as being a registered sex offender (SOIRA), giving your DNA to be stored in a data bank for future and past crimes, weapon prohibitions, travel consequences and the more obvious, job less and social stigma.
There are, however, defences to such offences. Dr MacDonald will not be able to use the most common Charter defence - section 8, the right to unreasonable search and seiziure. That is, a computer he used was probably alleged to contain the child porn. However, since the allegations were that it occurred at work, he does not have a privacy interest in that computer. It would be different if say it was his personal computer. Then he could possible challenge the warrant or warrantless seizure if one was issued arguing there was not enough reasonable and probable grounds (RPG) to issue the warrant and that the police should have done more corroboration and investigation before issuance of the warrant or seizing the computer.
Interestingly though, another defence is that Dr Ian MacDonald will possibly have is whether or not there was sole possession or access to the computer. Perhaps the computer was shared by many or many people had access to his password and computer which in turn could have given to others. The more public and accessible a computer is, the more reasonable that others could downloaded the offensive files.
If the prosecution is able to prove that Dr Ian Macdonald did in fact download the offensive material or child porn and that no one else could have done it, then another possible defence is whether or not there is a honest but mistaken belief in what the images were. Say for example the offensive material is named something different than what the actual material it is, then perhaps when it was downloaded, the accused person thought he was downloading something completely different. There would be no mens rea or mental culpability of downloading child porn.
Every case is different and there are many different defences. It’s important to hire an experienced lawyer when defending these offences. This comes down to not only knowing the case law but also being able to effectively cross examine in court and bringing enough reasonable doubt to acquit. Remember, you don’t have to prove you didn’t do the offence, you just need to show that there is some reasonable doubt you didn’t do it.
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