WINNIPEG — Lawyer Gary Dolovich has pleaded guilty in provincial court here to possessing and distributing child pornography.

When arrested in July 2006,  Dolovich was charged with 17 counts of distributing child pornography over the Internet.  The charges related to the distribution of hundreds of images.

He pleaded guilty to one count encompassing offences that occurred between February and October of 2005. He will be sentenced this spring and could face a jail term.

Dolovich’s lawyer, Josh Weinstein, said that in the upcoming sentencing hearing, he will be “asking the court that [Dolovich] not go to jail.”

Weinstein is awaiting a report from a forensic psychologist that he said will consider whether his client is a risk to the community and detail steps that Dolovich, who did not profit monetarily from distributing the child porn images, has taken toward rehabilitation.

Born and raised in Winnipeg,  Dolovich, an Orthodox Jew, was called to the Manitoba bar in 1991 and immigrated to Israel in 1998. In Israel, he worked as a lawyer and lived in the small settlement of Talmon in the West Bank, about 18 kilometres east of Modiin.

In 2001 Dolovich left Israel and returned to live in Winnipeg, where he worked as the executive director of a local kashrut organization.

When he was arrested, Dolovich was working as a legal researcher for the Manitoba Court of Appeal, where he had also worked prior to making aliyah.

Winnipeg Police began to investigate him after receiving a tip from a national police body that deals with child exploitation.

The extensive police investigation led to the search and seizure of several computers and hardware, including ones used by the province’s highest court.

Dolovich was arrested at Pearson International Airport in Toronto after police had issued a Canada-wide warrant for him.

He is divorced from his second wife and is the father of two children, who at the time of his arrest were aged seven and one. His second ex-wife and two children returned to live in Israel in 2007.

Det.-Sgt. Richard Lemire of the Manitoba Integrated Child Exploitation Unit said that his unit “will often be asked [by the Crown] to do a presentation to the judge at the sentencing hearing and will show the judge a representative sampling of the child pornography images found. This [part of the hearing ] will be closed to the public.”

He added: “These types of charges using the Internet have become very pervasive. It is a worldwide problem. It knows no demographics.”