GUILTY PLEA | 

Wife of serving cop ordered to sign sex offenders register after admitting child porn charge

Speaking quietly, she responded ‘Guilty’ to the charge of ‘inciting, encouraging or assisting the distribution of indecent images of children’

Paul Higgins

Yesterday at 15:30

The wife of a serving police officer was ordered to sign the sex offenders register today after she admitted an offence relating to indecent images of children.

With the 43-year-old standing in the dock of Antrim Crown Court, defence counsel Michael Ward asked for one of the two charges to be put to the defendant again.

Speaking quietly, she responded “Guilty” when the charge of “inciting, encouraging or assisting the distribution of indecent images of children” was put to her.

The defendant, who cannot be named because of an anonymity order based on the opinion of a consultant psychiatrist that she is likely to commit suicide if she’s named and shamed in the media, admitted that between March 29 and June 5, 2020, she assisted a named male “in the distribution of indecent images of children”.

Following the defendant’s confession, prosecuting counsel Suzanne Gallagher asked for count one — an offence of distributing or showing an indecent image of a child — to be left on the books, which was granted by Judge Roseanne McCormick KC.

While the facts of the case have not yet been opened, previous courts have heard that the defendant had claimed that her phone had been hacked on the dark web.

In court today, Mr Ward said, in addition to the pre-sentence probation report, he would also be lodging a further report from a consultant psychiatrist.

Freeing the anonymous defendant on bail, Judge McCormick adjourned passing sentence until September 12 and ordered that the “notification requirement [of the sex offenders register] apply as of today”.