A 35-YEAR-OLD Borders man who had almost 57,000 indecent images of children has been jailed for three years.

Brendan Lennon – who had been jailed for 16 months for a previous offence – was on supervision when he was caught again with the pornographic photos of children as young as three.

Selkirk Sheriff Court was told that acting on intelligence received, police officers visited his parents' home in Whitefield Crescent, Newtown St Boswells, on March 15 last year and seized the tablet device from his bedroom.

After being examined it was found that 56,931 files had been created – 49,526 of them were accessible images featuring girls aged between three and 15 and the rest had been deleted.

The court heard that 1,380 of the accessible images were in the Category A – the most serious.

Also in Category A were 192 inaccessible images and four accessible videos.

Fiona Hamilton, prosecuting, said 46,904 accessible images on the tablet were in Category C.

Lennon was arrested at a boarding kennels near St Boswells where he was working part time last March and has been on remand ever since.

The former lab technician had been living with his parents in Newtown St Boswells but also has a flat in Hawick.

He pleaded guilty to making the indecent photographs by saving them onto a tablet between December 2021 and March 2022.

His previous offence had involved downloading 26,328 images of youngsters between five and 12 years old.

His lawyer Gayle Addison said Lennon had shown high levels of distress, guilt and shame over his offending.

She added that he had been meeting a psychologist in Saughton Prison to seek help on his addictions to gambling and pornography and other matters.

Sheriff Peter Paterson said an aggravating factor was the high number of images in Category A and also that he had served a previous custodial sentence.

He would have imposed a prison sentence of 48 months but it was reduced to 36 months due to the guilty plea. The sentence was back-dated to March 16, 2022, when he was first remanded in custody in connection with the case.

Lennon was also made subject to the notification requirements of the Sexual Offences Act for life.