On 7 February the Daily Mail carried a report of a court clerk who was caught watching hard-core pornography on his monitor by a judge. What makes the case even more disturbing – if that is possible – is the fact that he perused the images DURING A RAPE TRIAL, while the victim was giving evidence.

Debasish Majumder looked at photographs of topless women being gagged and couples engaged in sexual acts, Kingston Crown Court was told. Majumder, who had worked at Inner London Crown Court for a number of years, later admitted routinely watching porn while trials were taking place, the report added.

Prosecutor Annabel Darlow said: “Majumder was working as a court clerk at Inner London and his conduct constituted a wholesale abuse of his position and the equipment provided in that he viewed porn sites on his court computer whilst the court was engaged in the conduct of a trial on an allegation of rape.”

Judge Nigel Seed QC spotted a search list of explicit sexual language and at another point saw an image of a blonde engaged in a sex act on a man.

Ms Darlow said: “Judge Seed noticed what was taking place. He initially hoped that he had been mistaken or the behaviour would desist. On 10 December he did take action and drew the attention to the matter of the resident judge.”

He confessed to police it was not the first time he had used his time at work to search for porn.

Ms Darlow said: “He said that he watched a lot of internet porn; he said that at work there were moments in his day that were boring and he would surf the net not to get access to sites but to get the titles of sites to use on his home computer and normally sites were blocked.

“He said that nobody in the court would be able to see what he was looking at on his screen apart from the judge and the judge would not be able to read the names as the print was too small.”

Majumder pleaded guilty to one charge of misconduct in public office and five counts of possession of indecent images. On his home computer police found a number of pseudo porn images of children and 12 extreme porn pictures. Susannah Stevens, defending, said that a stroke her client suffered roughly eight months ago could have affected his mental state.

She said: “The stroke and Mr Majumder’s cognitive state might explain the complete breakdown of his thought processes and his ability to tell right from wrong, and that is of huge importance when it comes to sentence.”