Jeremy Bulloch (42), from the Merrie Monk pub in Dunton Bassett, died after being hit by a refuse lorry on Monday, November 2, in Desford Road, Leicester.

He was due to appear at Leicester Crown Court hours later to be sentenced for possessing more than 10,000 indecent images of children on his computer, including 248 at level five, considered the most serious by the courts.

Bulloch had also shared 3,900 of the images with other people.

He had pleaded guilty in September to five charges of possessing indecent images and Harborough magistrates had made an order banning his identification.

The Lutterworth Mail and the Leicester Mercury contested that court order on the basis that it was unlawful and because the Court of Appeal had ruled in 2008 that a similar order was illegal.

At Leicester Crown Court on Monday, Judge David Price agreed the original order imposed at the magistrates’ court had been inappropriate and lifted the ban.

Prosecution barrister Alan Murphy also said that the normal practice in instances where defendants die before the outcome of a case is to not offer any evidence. He added: “Can we instead simply endorse the court record to say that the body of the defendant has now been identified?”

Mr Murphy also said there were two statements which confirmed that Bulloch was the man who had died.

At an earlier hearing in September, at Harborough Magistrates’ Court, prosecutor Sukhjit Singh said Bulloch had been caught when a police officer contacted him on the MSN online chat service posing as a paedophile.

A police raid at his home, the Merrie Monk pub, in January 2008 uncovered a computer which contained the indecent images.

The court was also told at the time that Bulloch had been convicted of indecent exposure in the 1990s.