Former Premier League referee David Coote has pled guilty to the charge of making an indecent image of a child.
Coote had previously pled not guilty at a hearing in September after being initially charged in August. The 43-year-old former official from Nottinghamshire was accused of a Category A offence—the most severe—after an indecent image of a 15-year-old was discovered on a hard drive at his residence.
The file was last accessed on Jan. 2, 2020, when it was extracted from a hard drive to a laptop.
Coote will be sentenced on Dec. 11. During a six-minute hearing at Crown Court on Tuesday, Judge Nirmal Shant KC said: “You have pleaded guilty to a serious matter. Whether this means custody or not will be decided when all the information is before the court.”
“You must not go away with the impression that this will not lead to a custodial sentence,” Judge Shant added.
The former referee was sacked by the Premier League’s governing body of officials after a video surfaced showing Coote making derogatory comments about Liverpool and their former manager Jürgen Klopp. UEFA subsequently banned Coote from refereeing in any European competition after he was judged to have “violated the basic rules of decent conduct” and “brought the sport of football, and UEFA in particular, into disrepute.”
Coote has now been added to the sex offenders’ register for a yet-to-determined length of time. The terms of his conditional bail prevent Coote from any unsupervised interaction with an individual under the age of 18. He is also forbidden from staying at an address where a child is present.
The Protection of Children Act 1978 notes that the maximum sentence for making indecent images of children is 10 years. If Coote is deemed to have only downloaded the files in question, he could serve a maximum of five years.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sacked Premier League Referee David Coote Pleads Guilty to Making Indecent Video of Child.
