A performing arts student caught with sick child porn stored on a memory stick – along with his CV – has failed to convince top judges he was wrongly convicted.

Adam Bridges, 21, a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, was reported to police by a friend who found the USB stick in their home and was appalled by its contents.

Bridges, of Marriott Road, West Ham, later said he had lost the stick and denied being in possession of it at the time the images were saved.

However, he was convicted of three counts of possessing indecent images of a child by a jury at Wood Green Crown Court in December last year and given a six-month suspended sentence.

On Friday, at London’s Criminal Appeal Court his lawyers failed to convice judges that problems with police technical facilities made his convictions “unsafe”.

The court heard Bridges was arrested in September 2010 after three child porn films, close to the top of the scale of depravity, were found on the memory stick which had been left on the floor of a student house. Bridges’ C.V was also stored on it.

His lawyers argued that technical problems with police computers meant that evidence which went before the jury relating to the dates on which Bridges had “control” of the memory stick could not be relied upon.

It was claimed that it was impossible to discern whether he had “control of the stick at the relevant time” and that the evidence ought not to have gone before the jury.

But Mr Justice Hickinbottom, dismissing the application for permission to appeal, said that the evidence was not in fact vital to the findings of the jury.

“We cannot see that any disadvantage to this applicant derived from the admission of the evidence, and we refuse the application for lweave,” the judge concluded.