A CONVICTED sex offender who breached the terms of a court order made to protect women and children from him has had an appeal against his three-year prison sentence thrown out.

William Alfred Rogers, 65, formerly of Entwistle Street, Darwen, was given the jail sentence by Judge Simon Newell at Preston Crown Court after being convicted on two counts of breaching a sexual offences prevention order.

And Rogers, who has 38 convictions for sexual offences against adults and children, appealed against the length of that sentence to the Court of Appeal.

But the case was dismissed by Mr Justice Timothy Holroyde who said the court was unable to say the sentence was “manifestly excessive”.

The court heard Rogers was made subject of an indefinite SOPO in 2009 which among other things banned him from having unsupervised contact with a child under 16 without the consent of their parent or guardian and using any device capable of accessing the internet unless he made it available on request for inspection by a police officer, and didn’t delete the history.

But the court was told what in April 2016 he failed to disclose to an officer that he had a laptop. Its existence only came to light when he was reported to the police by a friend when a man asked to fix the computer discovered a video of a woman doing a private act in a bathroom, which had been covertly filmed by Rogers.

The court heard that while on bail for that offence he had started a relationship with a woman but failed to disclose his past criminality or the terms of his SOPO. In August 2016 he drove the woman to visit her ex-partner in prison and was left unaccompanied with her nine-year-old girl. The court heard there was no allegations Rogers, most recently of Market Street, Chorley, did anything towards the girl and her 19-year-old brother was yards away at the time.

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Holroyde said: “Overall, the learned judge had to sentence a man with a long history of offending, including for sexual offences, who had previously breached his SOPO and had not been deterred from further breaches.

"We are unable to say that a total of three years’ imprisonment for these two further breaches was manifestly excessive.”