Former Premier League referee David Coote has pleaded guilty to the offence of making an indecent image of a child. The case returned to Crown Court for a brief hearing on Tuesday, where details of the digital evidence were outlined.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors told the court 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.<\/p>\n
During a six-minute hearing, Judge Nirmal Shant KC addressed the seriousness of the plea. \u201cYou have pleaded guilty to a serious matter. Whether this means custody or not will be decided when all the information is before the court.\u201d The judge added: \u201cYou must not go away with the impression that this will not lead to a custodial sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coote had already faced disciplinary action from football authorities after a separate incident. He was sacked by the Premier League\u2019s governing body of officials after a video surfaced showing Coote making derogatory comments about Liverpool and their former manager J\u00fcrgen Klopp. UEFA later banned Coote from refereeing in any European competition, finding that he had \u201cviolated the basic rules of decent conduct\u201d and \u201cbrought the sport of football, and UEFA in particular, into disrepute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following the guilty plea, Coote has been added to the sex offenders\u2019 register for a yet-to-be-determined length of time. The terms of his conditional bail include significant restrictions aimed at protecting minors: he is prevented from any unsupervised interaction with an individual under the age of 18 and is forbidden from staying at an address where a child is present.<\/p>\n
The sentencing on Dec. 11 will consider the offence, the evidence, and any mitigation before the court reaches a decision on whether a custodial sentence is appropriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ex-Premier League referee David Coote pleaded guilty to making an indecent image of a child. Dec 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3789,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,969],"tags":[1142,1141],"class_list":["post-3790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-legal","tag-referees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}