Voyeur placed hidden camera in Downe toilet

Voyeur placed hidden camera in Downe toilet

30 October 2019

A HEALTH Trust worker who placed cameras in a staff toilet at the Downe Hospital for his “perverse gratification” was given a one-year suspended jail sentence at Downpatrick Court last Friday. 

David Britton (51) admitted five counts of voyeurism when he set a video camera to show a total of 16 nursing staff, one of them male, using the toilet on dates between August 15, 2013, and June 30, 2015. 

Britton was dismissed from his post as an IT worker at the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, when he was convicted of voyeurism charges at Downpatrick Magistrates’ Court in October 2015. 

A prosecution lawyer said Britton’s earlier offences was linked to the present charges, but the full extent of his offending had not been revealed until recently.

The lawyer told the court that a hard drive had been discovered when a disused ICT room at Lagan Valley Hospital in Lisburn was being cleared out in March 2016. 

The lawyer added that several pieces of footage were detected on the drive and DNA was taken from the camera. 

The prosecutor said that when police viewed the footage Britton’s face could “clearly be seen setting the camera up”.

He added when police cautioned Britton, he began to cry and admitted his guilt before DNA tests took place. 

A defence lawyer said Britton, of Antrim Road, Belfast, was “contrite” and a pre-sentence report revealed he was “clearly upset” at the hurt he had caused. 

Remarking that it was a “very distasteful case”, Judge Geoffrey Millar said Britton had told a “blatant lie” in 2015 when he failed to disclose he had viewed the footage.

He said the “invasion of privacy” had a significant impact on the nursing staff involved, with one nurse having to cope with being told twice that she was a victim of Britton’s wrongdoing. 

Judge Millar said that over the last three years Briton had been the “subject of close scrutiny” and there had been no further offending. 

Sentencing Britton Judge Millar added that there was no excuse for what amounted to “nothing more than perverse sexual gratification”.