A judge has urged the Public Prosecution Service to have a female prosecutor review the case against a Co Armagh man accused of computer hacking and voyeurism.
Recording not guilty pleas in the case against 35-year-old Christopher McSherry, District Judge Bernie Kelly asked the PPS lawyer: “are you seriously prosecuting this in the Magistrates Court?”
“Yes,” replied the lawyer, adding that the file had been looked at and considered by a senior prosecutor.
“I assume it was a male prosecutor?,” asked the judge and the PPS confirmed it was.
“Could I ask that a female prosecutor look at it please?” suggested DJ Kelly, “it’s the sheer number of different individuals and this went on for many years.”
McSherry, from Drumnagoon Meadows in Portadown, is facing seven charges allegedly committed between 31 December 2015 and 1 January 2019 including one count of unauthorised computer access and six counts of voyeurism.
None of the alleged facts surrounding the charges have been opened in court but the particulars of the offences allege that McSherry recorded two different women “doing a private act with the intention that you or a third person, for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification, would look at an image of the person doing the act and you knew that they did not consent to the recording of the act.”
McSherry is also alleged to have “caused a computer to perform a function with intent to secure access to a program or data held in a computer or to enable any such access to be secured, the access you intended to secure or to enable to be secured being unauthorised.”
Adjourning the case to 21 June, DJ Kelly said she would “do one of two things on that date - either change jurisdiction or fix a date for contest.”