Parkinson drugs turned headmaster into paedophile

A former headmaster who amassed thousands of indecent images of children on his computer walked free from court yesterday, after a judge ruled that the drug he had been taking to treat his Parkinson's disease was responsible for his crime.

Phillip Carmichael, 58, pleaded guilty to the offences, but received an absolute discharge – escaping any form of punishment – after claiming that the pills he had been taking turned him into a paedophile.

Police discovered 8,000 images and videos stored on the former schoolteacher's computer during a raid on his home in Wantage, Oxfordshire. But only one of them had been downloaded before he was prescribed dopamine-stimulating drugs to treat his two illnesses, Parkinson's disease and Graves' disease.

Mr Carmichael, the former headmaster of a primary school, who had an "impeccable record", claimed the medicine was known to have side effects including compulsive gambling, shopping and hypersexuality, or sex addiction. The defendant took both cabergoline and ropinirole, collectively known as dopamine agonists. Cabergoline has since been withdrawn from use.

Judge Mary Jane Mowat described the case as "wholly exceptional", and said it was clear that Mr Carmichael had not acted under his own volition.

She said: "This is a very distressing case. To say that he was to blame would be a complete denial of the reality of the evidence that I see.

"He was not only an ill man at the time, but a man whose medication can be described as ultimately responsible for the committal of these offences."