The Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland is to challenge the acquittal of a solicitor who was cleared of a charge of voyeurism.
He was cleared despite admitting that he had used a mobile phone to film a woman in a changing room.
The charge against 32-year-old Richie MacRitchie, a lawyer who practises in Belfast and lives near Omeath in Co Louth, related to an incident in a mixed-sex changing area at a leisure centre on the Falls Road in west Belfast in October 2006.
Mr MacRitchie was charged after a woman told staff she saw a man holding a mobile phone under the wall of her cubicle after she had been in the swimming pool.
Mr MacRitchie denied the offence, and the magistrate, Fiona Bagnall, dismissed the charge, despite saying she was satisfied the prosecution had made a case that the images were recorded for sexual gratification.
The magistrate held that the woman was not engaged in a private act, according to the sexual offences legislation, and she based her ruling on the acceptance that the woman was wearing a bikini at the time she was filmed.
However the DPP has decided to contest the lawyer's acquittal, and the legal grounds on which he was cleared will be re-examined by Northern Ireland's Court of Appeal.
