Daniel Patrick Gall guilty of accessing and possessing child exploitation and child abuse material

A middle aged man with a child pornography collection of almost 25,000 photos and videos of children as young as three, did it because of what he claimed was a ‘desperate need to be accepted’.

Daniel Patrick Gall built up a child pornography collection of almost 25,000 images and videos including children as young as three years old.

A former kitchen hand had more than 20,000 files containing sexually explicit images and videos of children as young as three years old.

Daniel Patrick Gall, 47, pleaded guilty in Bundaberg District Court on Wednesday to charges including accessing and possessing child exploitation and child abuse material.

Crown prosecutor Annica Fritz told the court in April 2022 police identified Gall had been accessing online child exploitation material and searched his house later that day, seizing a number of devices containing child exploitation material, including Motorola Edge and Telstra smartphones, a desktop computer, external hard drive and tablets.

A total of 24,940 images and video files were contained across all devices, of which police analysed a selected sample due to the large quantity of files.

Their analysis identified 2688 images and 2799 videos containing child exploitation material, including a video of a child between three or four years old being penetrated by an adult male and many images and videos of children aged between six and 13 focusing on their genitalia or showing the children involved in sexual acts.

Ms Fritz told the court that within one week of his devices being seized, Gall remotely wiped the contents of one of his mobile phones which was in police custody, enabled by police having failed to turn it to airplane mode.

Police found another desktop computer on which Gall had accessed child exploitation material around six weeks after his house was first searched.

A subsequent police search of Gall’s house found another desktop computer on which Gall had accessed child exploitation material in May 2022, around six weeks after his house was first searched, following which Gall was arrested and remanded in custody.

Gall’s defence barrister Simone Bain told the court a psychological assessment of Gall reported he had denied being sexually attracted to children, and his offending was driven by “a desperate need to be accepted, wanted and … needed in a social sense”.

After leaving school, where he was subject to bullying and was regularly beaten, Gall had various jobs including labouring, working in a meat works kitchen and as a retail and electrical installation assistant.

The court heard Gall last worked as a kitchen hand in 2015 when he was subjected to bullying from one of the senior members of the kitchen which led him to resign, which led to a “nervous breakdown” and an attempt to take his own life in 2019.

In sentencing, Judge John Allen KC told Gall he had “an addictive compulsion towards accessing and possessing child pornography”, and given his age “could have been under no misapprehension that real children had suffered terribly in the course of production” of the images and videos in his possession.

“These are not victimless offences, and your offending perpetuates a market for such images and the continued sexual abuse of innocent children who are forever damaged by such an experience,” Judge Allen said.

For offences including one count of using a carriage service to access child exploitation material, two counts of using a carriage service to access child abuse material, one count of possessing child exploitation material and one count of attempting to pervert justice, Gall was given a head sentence of five years in prison with immediate release on parole due to 492 days served in pre-sentence custody.