Court Clerk Pleads Guilty to Viewing Hardcore Porn During Rape Trial
By Claire Gordon , Posted Feb 7th 2012 @ 11:51AM
You won't end up in court for watching hardcore pornography. But you will if you were watching that hardcore pornography in court in the first place. That's what one court clerk discovered, after a judge saw him accessing the images in December 2010, during a rape trial in London Crown Court. The man had recently suffered a stroke, according to his defense, which had destroyed "his ability to tell right from wrong," reports the Daily Mail.
Debasish Majumber, 54, had been a court clerk for a number of years, and admitted to looking for porn once or twice a week, during the boring points in a trial, for the previous year. He would collect the names of sites he wanted to visit later on his home computer. Only the judge, he claimed, could possibly see him prowling the belly of web, and the text was too small for even him to see.
But it wasn't too small for Judge Nigel Seed. He noticed the explicit search list, and also spotted a pornographic image, reports the Daily Mail. Seed notified the resident judge. In the following investigation, police found a smutty search list in Majumber's internet history, as well as extreme pornographic images on his home computer, including simulations of child porn.
The prosecutor, Annabel Darlow, said that "it could not have been more clear that using court computers to access or research pornography would have been anything other than the clearest possible case of gross misconduct."
Majumber pled guilty to one charge of misconduct in public office and five counts of possession of indecent images. The sentencing is delayed until later this month, after the court receives further medical records. Majumber suffered a stroke eight months prior, according to his defense, Susannah Stevens. She believes this should have serious bearing on his sentence, since it "might explain the complete breakdown of his thought processes."
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Claire Gordon
Claire Gordon has contributed to Slate's DoubleX, the Huffington Post, and the book Prisons: Current Controversies. While an undergraduate at Yale University and a research fellow at Yale graduate school, she spoke on panels at Yale and Cornell, and reported from Cairo, Tokyo, and Berlin. Follow Claire on Twitter.
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