MEDICS were called to Oxford Crown Court after a paedophile suffered breathing difficulties – as he sat in the dock.

Judge Nigel Daly had just told Stephen Wakeley he was being sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment when the 68-year-old began hyperventilating. The judge was yet to say whether the jail time would be immediate or suspended.

A dock officer removed Wakeley’s mask and took him to the floor before another officer arrived to help. The court was cleared and medics called.

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The case resumed almost an hour later, with Wakeley sat in the back of the dock.

Jailing him for 10 months, Judge Daly said he’d considered whether the sentence could be suspended but told Wakeley he was concerned he’d continued to look at indecent images of children despite having been arrested by the police.

The judge said: “You were not technically on bail but you knew full well the police were investigating your computers and you knew that they would find illegal indecent images of children and you went on committing offences.”

Earlier, Oxford Crown Court heard how Wakeley told police officers he’d had child sex abuse images to send to women on a dating website to “establish whether they were genuinely seeking a relationship”. If they were disgusted it would show they were not committed to a liaison.

Wakeley also claimed that a number of women on the website had asked him for things like iTunes vouchers. Prosecutor Robert Lindsey said: “He felt sending the images was a form of revenge against them.”

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He was arrested first in 2018 when police raided his caravan near Garsington having received information he was uploading indecent images of children to the web.

Among the devices seized were his Acer laptop and an SD card on which police found almost 7,000 indecent images of children including 995 in category A.

Wakeley had downloaded software to enable him to access the dark web and had searched online for the notorious 1960s cult Children of God, which encouraged sex between children and adults. He also looked at websites purporting to show schoolchildren being sexually assaulted.

He was released under investigation but, within a year, police were back at his door. It emerged he’d bought a laptop from Argos within two months of his initial arrest. On the laptop, police found 292 indecent images of children, including 47 in category A, 33 in category B and 212 category C.

The vile cache included both images and video, with some of the material showing the rape of girls aged two to 11.

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Evidence suggested he’d uploaded images to video conferencing platform Google Hangouts, although it could not be proved that the pictures – taken on his digital camera of indecent images on a computer screen – were shared with others.

Mitigating, Lucy Ffrench said her client had become increasingly isolated following the death of his long-lost mother. He had been raised by grandparents to believe that his birth mother was, in fact, his sister. His mother, with whom he was reunited three years before her death, and his sister both died in 2018 not long before he began building his illegal collection.

She told the judge Wakeley “clearly finds the matter extremely difficult to talk about and he doesn’t remember much of it”. The advocate added: “He feels very ashamed.”

He suffered poor physical health and feared he would lose his mobile home if he was sent to prison. Ms Ffrench said Wakeley – a former factory worker and Oxford Brookes groundsman - acquired a cat last year, which had transformed his life by calming him down and giving him something to care for.

Wakeley, of Alpha Avenue, Garsington, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to six counts of making indecent images of children. He will serve half his 10 month sentence behind bars before he is eligible for release.

A spokeswoman for South Central Ambulance Service said paramedics were called to St Aldates at 3.51pm but would not confirm that the crew was sent to the crown court.

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