A flasher with a love heart tattooed beneath his right eye stared straight at a bus passenger as he performed a sex act on himself while he drove by in his van.

Aaron Duffy, 28, had already been given prison time for flashing supermarket staff by the time he committed the lewd act on the dual carriageway.

And at the time of his latest offence on May 9, he was subject to a two year suspended prison sentence for dealing cocaine.

Jailing him for a total of 18 months on Monday (May 22), Judge Maria Lamb said: “You are the author of your own misfortune.

“I have no doubt that the consequences of further offending would have been explained very clearly to you at the time that suspended sentence was imposed in April 2021.

“I know that you continue not to accept your guilt of the offence for which you were tried and found guilty in the magistrates’ court, but I have to deal with you on the basis that you did commit that offence and it is not an isolated instance."

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Prosecutor Alice Aubrey-Fletcher told Oxford Crown Court that a passenger seated on the bottom deck of an X3 bus on the Southern bypass noticed a man in a passing van ‘naked from the waist down’.

It was shortly after 6am and, in spite of the early hour, the van driver was performing a sex act on himself.

At one point, the van-driving onanist was said to have looked directly at the woman watching horrified from the bus.

The prosecutor said: “As the bus pulled away from the van, she noted the registration and provided it to the police.”

The vehicle’s registration led police to Duffy. Interviewed, he admitted owning the van and driving it that day. But he denied performing a sex act on the bypass or having his genitals exposed.

Duffy, of Fiarn Street, Bridgwater, was found guilty at the magistrates’ court of a single count of indecent exposure. He had nine previous convictions for 15 offences, including four for exposure.

At Mold Crown Court in North Wales in April 2021, he was handed a two year suspended sentence for dealing cocaine.

The conviction came after police stopped his vehicle in Wrexham and found more than a gramme of cocaine.

The find led police to Duffy’s home, where 13g of the class A drug was seized together with a ‘large quantity’ of a substance commonly used to bulk out the designer drug.

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Mitigating, Bethan Chichester said her client had managed to turn his life around since the 2021 conviction, gaining an apprenticeship in the construction industry and slowly paying off debts. Being sent to prison would mean the loss of his livelihood.

After he was sentenced to the 18 month jail term, Duffy made a plea for mercy from the dock.

“I clearly need help,” he told Judge Lamb, who moments earlier said the flasher would remain a risk until he recognised he had ‘self-evidently a problem’.

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