AN amateur coach who was found guilty of abusing a teenage boy at an East Renfrewshire tennis club has had an appeal against his conviction rejected.
The Appeal Court in Edinburgh threw out the case of Wightman, who is in his 60s, which included claims that police had exceeded their search warrant rights and that the sheriff at his trial had misdirected the jury.
The first ground of appeal was that police forensic examiner Peter Benson had exceeded the terms of the search warrant when he found images of other children aged between 12 and 15 on computer memory in Wightman’s house.
Appeal judge Lord Drummond Young rejected this on the grounds that Benson, while carrying out an authorised search, had discovered evidence of criminal offences, and was bound to act.
Wightman denied possession of images found on both his laptop and PC. He was found guilty of taking or permitting to be taken or making indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children.
Lord Drummond Young said the sheriff told the jury this would cover downloading material to a storage device or printing a photograph from the internet or opening an email attachment or downloading an image from a website.” The Appeal Court concluded that the sheriff had given “clear and proper” instructions to the jury.
After his trial in April last year, Wightman was given a community payback order and told to seek sex offender counselling.
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