Tag: Central Criminal Court (Page 5 of 5)

Concessions and Lies

12th January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Eamonn Lillis told gardai and the emergency services that both he and his wife, Celine Cawley, had been attacked by a masked attacker in their Howth home. He said that this balaclava’d and gloved man had hit his wife over the head with a brick and then turned on him.

This morning, after prosecution counsel Mary Ellen Ring had finished her opening speech, Mr Lillis’s counsel, Brendan Grehan stood up to make a number of concessions. It’s normal enough to hear that the defence aren’t going to argue over the conditions of their client’s arrest or the way the scene what preserved and the evidence gathered, the technicalities of the investigation of a serious crime. In total Mr Grehan made eight concessions that there had been no hiccups in how the gardai did their job. Then he came to the ninth admission.

Mr Lillis, he said, admitted lying to gardai and emergency services about the circumstances in which his wife had suffered the injuries that led to her death. There had been no burglary, no intruder, no one apart from him in the house when she was injured.

According to the prosecution’s opening speech, the post mortem evidence will show that Celine Cawley died from a combination of factors, three blows to the head with a blunt object and more mundane complications after a fall when the now obese former model had been unable to breath after falling unconscious on her front.

We were also told, in the prosecution’s opening argument, that Mr Lillis had been having an affair in the months before his wife’s death. Gardai had discovered a significant amount of phone traffic from phones belonging to Mr Lillis to phones belonging to a woman called Jean Treacy.

Ms Treacy is sure to be a major witness, as we have been told that she will also tell the court about the account Mr Lillis gave her about his wife’s death…a fight that turned physical, an icy deck and a fatal slip. But so far all we’ve heard is the outline of the prosecution case, the evidence will come later.

The new courthouse, which will be officially opened by the President of Ireland at the weekend, is hosting it’s first murder trial. As proceedings got underway today there were some noticeable teething troubles. Soon after the jury had taken their seats there was a loud alarm and a disembodied voice began to announce an evacuation but was quickly cut of in mid sentence. But despite the technical gripes there are certain new high tech whizz bangs that certainly add to the experience of the initial rather dry evidence.

The first couple of witnesses in a criminal trial are almost always maps and photographs. Before the trial goes any further the jury are provided with maps of the area in question and photographs of places or objects that are going to be referred to by subsequent witnesses. Normally if you’re sitting in the body of the court this evidence is rather dull. They don’t hand out maps to the whole courtroom and it’s the same with the photos so unless you’ve got extremely good eyesight there’s a lot of talking about things you can’t see.

Now though, the maps and photographs appear on large screens behind the judge. We can all see the high hedge that surrounds the house on Windgate Road in Howth. The trappings of a privileged life of the occupants are visible to all; the large garden, stables, hot tub. We can also all see the bright red stain that covers part of the decking outside the kitchen,

Crime scene photos are always uncomfortable windows on a tragedy, the flotsam and jetsam of normal lives mixed in with the detritus left by the emergency services. On the kitchen table a portable oxygen mask sits beside a black woman’s handbag and the Irish Times. The sad remnants of a Christmas cut short are visible in each picture, tinsel draped over pictures, a Christmas tree standing forlornly in the corner of the living room.

In an upstairs bedroom the gloved hand of one of the garda forensics team holds a grey top. A bedside table home to a scatter of change, a Lotto ticket and a watch that we are later shown has traces of blood and tissue on it.

In her opening speech, Mary Ellen Ring told us that Mr Lillis had called the emergency services shortly after 10 o’clock on the morning of December 15th 2008. After lunch we heard a recording of that call. Mr Lillis’s voice rang across the courtroom, sounding strangely high pitched and almost hysterical. We listened as he was led through the CPR procedure by the emergency phone operator from Dublin Fire Brigade. He could be heard breathing raggedly and deeply as he listened to the instructions, his voice rising even higher as his actions failed to get a response.

We also head from members of the fire brigade and gardai who responded to Mr Lillis’s frantic call. Garda Colum Murray described arriving first on the scene and being greeted by a Mr Lillis who was “very unsteady on his feet” and “not making much sense”. Mr Lillis also had visible injuries, scratches to his right cheek and two bruises on his left cheek and forehead that looked as if they had been made by a heavy object.

Barbara Cahill, from Kilbarrack Fire Station also arrived at the scene that morning. She told the court how she had needed to salt the slippery decking after one of her colleagues slipped and fell on the icy surface.

The trial will continue tomorrow and the story will develop.

The First Trial of the Year

11th January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

The snows are finally melting and the Christmas decorations are down. The new court term got underway today under leaden grey skies, in an ocean of slush. From today on there will be no more Four Courts for criminal trials. All the criminal courts are now officially moved to the grandly named Criminal Courts of Justice on Parkgate Street in Dublin, right next to the Phoenix Park.

For the press the new court term got off to a good start with a trial listed that will get editors pulses racing for the next couple of weeks. The trial won’t start until tomorrow but this morning the jury was sworn for Eamonn Lillis.

Mr Lillis is accused of the murder of his wife Celine Cawley, Bond girl, model and the woman behind Toytown Films, one of Irelands largest advertising production houses. As the jury panel were warned of the Cawley family’s connections in advertising and as solicitors, the pens scratched away furiously, getting every detail of the brief proceedings.

Mr Lillis stood stiffly while the single charge was read out to him. Dressed in a black coat, with a white shirt and sombre black tie, he tilted his chin up as he listened to the arraignment before answering quietly but firmly “Not guilty”.

The jury selection process was a departure from what we were all used to in the Four Courts. Instead of the jury panel taking every available seat in the court room they were hidden from sight, in a special holding area. Judge Paul Carney spoke to them via a TV link, explaining how the selection process would proceed and highlighting some of the basic facts of the case so that the jurors could excuse themselves if they knew anyone involved.

The names of twenty or so of the panel were read out and after a short pause they appeared clustered at the back of the jury box. They were then called one by one to take their oath, giving the prosecution and defence an opportunity to object to anyone they chose. Seven can be refused by either side, with no reason given. After that reasons must be given but the number of refusals is unlimited…we seldom get to the reasons though.

The registrar read through the list of names and the selection started. Every now and then either side would raise an objection to a juror who would then melt back into the background, dismissed. As the judge says, there is no way of knowing why a juror is refused. It could be because they were wearing a tie, or because they weren’t. Today, by accident or design, it seemed that the prosecution had a downer on young men of a more casual persuasion. Anyone with long hair or a band t-shirt was swiftly dispatched and obvious students refused.

The defence on the other hand refused women. A succession of middle aged women in comfortable clothes were sent packing while women in suits or obvious students took their seats. Eventually six men and six women were left. It’ll be up to them to decide guilt or innocence at the end of this trial.

Tomorrow the trial proper will start and we’ll discover which man or woman has been selected or volunteered as foreman. Today it’s all down to the inconsequential minutiae, like the tuning up of an orchestra. The new year has really begun.

A Fair and Swift Verdict

10th December 2009 / Abigail / 2 Comments

The jury only took half an hour to return their verdict on whether Ann Burke, who hit her husband Pat 23 times over the head with a hammer while he slept, was guilty of murder or manslaughter.

The verdict, when it came was the expected one. Both prosecution and defence were in agreement on the facts of the case and the psychiatrists both sides had produced to give evidence were agreed that Ann Burke was suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the killing. The verdict of not guilty by reason of diminished responsibility was a logical one, given the evidence in the trial.

The jury were at liberty to come to a range of verdicts from acquittal right through to murder but even the defence informed them that there was no doubt this was an unlawful killing and as such should result in some form of guilty verdict.

The trial was a brief one, only one garda gave evidence, rather than the endless procession you will usually find in a murder trial. Even the post mortem evidence was simply read into the record since there was no debate about it’s findings. The only other kind of murder trial that generally moves this quickly is one where the verdict is not guilty by reason of insanity.

In this case, both sides were careful to tell the jury, insanity was not an issue. Ann Burke had suffered from a severe depressive illness at the time of the killing but this was not counted as insanity. But in both sorts of trials, when both side agree on the medical diagnosis, the jury is instructed more than usual.

In a standard murder trial a jury is free to weigh up the evidence put before them and come to any one of the available verdicts. These will usually be acquittal, manslaughter or murder. Frequently it’s difficult to tell what the outcome will be, the evidence must be weighed carefully and the line between the options isn’t always clear cut.

But in cases where there’s a solid psychiatric diagnosis like this one, the verdict is almost a foregone conclusion. The jury must be the one’s to make the final decision. There’s only one situation where the judge will tell them to sign the issue paper a certain way and that’s when, for various reasons, the prosecution case has a serious undeniable flaw and the judge decides the only option is an acquittal. If the verdict is to be a guilty one then the accused still has a right to be judged by a jury of their peers.

Ann Burke will get to spend Christmas with her family before she is sentenced on January 25th. In the meantime a psychiatric report will be prepared and victim impact statements made by her family.

A Childhood in the Shadow of Violence

9th December 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Linda Burke’s earliest memory was standing in her pyjamas with her older brother at the top of the stairs looking down at her father. He was holding a loaded shotgun and shouting that he would blow their heads off. She would have been three or four at the time.

Her mother Ann is on trial in the Central Criminal Court, charged with murdering the man whose abuse was catalogued for the jury today. Linda described sitting in school on a Tuesday, the day her father was paid his dole when she was a child. Those days her mind was not on her lessons as she worried about what row would meet her when she went home.

When she was six her father taught her to tell the time. When she got the little and big hands mixed up he hit her across the face. When she cried in the face of the stinging pain he hit her to shut up and when she couldn’t he picked her up and threw her across the room.

Her father and mother were always fighting, she told the court. When she was thirteen her father hit her mother over the head with a sweeping brush, splitting her forehead open. He wouldn’t let Linda call for an ambulance forcing her to treat her mother herself as best she could.

Ann Burke had also had a childhood marred by violence. Her father, a carpenter, would hit the pub every Sunday, arriving home to batter his wife and children and throw the dinner on the floor. She told psychiatrists after the killing about lying in bed waiting for her father to come home drunk on a Sunday night.

Her mother eventually took a stand when she was diagnosed with cancer. Ann’s eldest brother was still living at home, a quiet man who had never married and who was completely unable to stand up to his father. Their mother got a barring order against their father banning from the family home but by then the damage had already been done and Ann, the baby of the family, was already destined to follow in her footsteps.

She left school at thirteen to follow her siblings into a knitwear factory. She met Pat Burke when she was 18 or 19.

Ann Burke didn’t consider it odd when her new husband beat her. It was all she had ever known. But the abusive life eventually took it’s toll. She started drinking because it was the only way she had enough courage to stand up to her husband’s drunken rages. She had tried to leave but always went back to him. The barring order she eventually took out in 2004 was short lived. Pat Burke simply refused to go.

By the time August 2007 arrived she was suffering from a severe depressive illness. Her self confidence was destroyed, she felt worthless and thought that her children’s lives would be better if she took her own life, sparing them the constant rows. She told the psychiatrists she spoke to that her husband had taken to raping her when she refused him sex and she could not see any way out of her situation.

On August 19th 2007, after her husband had arrived home in the small hours of the morning drunk and abusive yet again, she picked up the hammer that was lying in the bedroom and hit him over the head around 23 times, shattering his skull and irreparably damaging his brain. Pat Burke would have died quickly from his injuries. Ann Burke wanted to follow him.

Psychiatrists for both the Defence and the Prosecution agreed that she acted with diminished responsibility as a result of the mental illness she was suffering from. They told the jury the depression existed even when she wasn’t drinking and alcohol, while present, was not the driving force between the attack. Her feelings of desperation had driven her to the violent and tragic act.

The case is expected to finish tomorrow. The speeches won’t be long. Then it’s up to the jury.

Portrait of a Miserable Marriage

8th December 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Ann Burke told gardai that she didn’t think there was anything wrong when her new husband beat her up on their wedding night in 1975. It wasn’t the first time and even his mother had asked her why she wanted to marry him.

After 32 years of marriage the now alcoholic 56-year-old took a hammer and used it to hit her husband over the head around 23 times before trying to kill herself.

Mrs Burke’s four children sat around her while the prosecution read out the transcripts of the interviews she had with gardai. A litany of abuse ranging from casual cruelty to more serious threats against her life.

She told gardai that she and her husband had been arguing constantly since she had spent a couple of days in the psychiatric wing of Portlaoise General Hospital the week before his death in August 2007. She said he had told her that if she didn’t leave without treatment she needn’t bother coming home at all. She said that when she did return, on the Wednesday of that week, he told her he was ashamed of her for having spent time in the psychiatric wing.

Mrs Burke cried, dabbing her red eyes with a tissue handed to her by one of her daughters, as Garda Pat Lynn confirmed the voluntary statements she made when gardai accompanied her to hospital after her husband’s death on the Sunday of that same week.

She was heavily intoxicated and repeatedly told doctors and gardai that she knew what she had done and that her life was over. Her concern was mainly for her youngest son, still living at home, and for her inability to kill herself. Over and over she said that she wanted to die but couldn’t “do it right”.

In an interview with gardai a week after the events of August 19th she explained what had happened. The atmosphere had been tense since she had come home from hospital the previous week, she said. At around 7.30 on the Saturday her husband Pat went into Portlaoise to go drinking. She went to bed but at some time after 3am he rang her to tell her about phonecalls he had received from another woman.

A little before 6am he arrived home. She told gardai that she let him in when he hammered on the door. He had his own keys but always banged on the door for her to let him in – she said she always did so because otherwise he would try to break down the door.

He was drunk and as soon as he came in the argument started. It quickly degenerated into a shoving match and her daughter, Linda, who was back home for the weekend, came downstairs to separate them as she had done many times before. The row raged on and on until eventually her husband went to bed at around 9am.

Mrs Burke told gardai that she had had enough. She went out to a local shop to get a bottle of wine and the Sunday papers then at around 4.30 she took a hammer she said was already in the room from fixing curtains a few days previously. Then she beat her husband about the head. She told gardai she didn’t know why, couldn’t even remember the blows. It was as if it was all in a haze.

He fell off the bed and lay on the floor, dead. She wrote yet another suicide note apologising to her children and leaving instructions on how to use the electricity metre and what to do with the house. She wrote that she could not live with what she had done and was now sitting near her husband touching his cooling face. He had always said he would come back and haunt her, she wrote, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Today’s evidence painted a grim picture of a marriage. Tomorrow the story will be fleshed out as further witnesses add their input to the prosecution case. The trial isn’t expected to last long and to conclude by the end of the week.

Going Postal?

17th November 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

Sharon Whelan was getting ready for Christmas. She rang her parents three times that Christmas Eve to let her father know when it was safe for him to drop round the presents her parents had been keeping hidden from their two grandaughters, Nadia and Zsara.

Eventually, at around 10.45, she rang her dad to tell him that the children were finally asleep and it was safe to bring round the presents without spoiling the suprise of Santa’s visit. He drove the short distance to the run down farmhouse she was renting and parked a short distance away so as not to wake the children. Sharon came to meet him at the gate and took the presents from him. That was the last time he saw his daughter alive.

Today, 23-year-old postman Brian Hennessy admitted to murdering Sharon, Zsara and Nadia. He will serve two life sentences for his crimes as the sentences for the murder of the two children will only start after he has served one for killing their mother. Dressed in a greyish brown suit, his wavy blonde hair reaching his collar, Hennessy wept as Sharon’s brother John Whelan read a victim impact statement on behalf of the family, telling Hennessy that he had destroyed Christmas for the family for ever more.

Last Christmas, Hennessy had just finished four straight nightshifts in the sorting office in Kilkenny post office. He arrived home from work after his shift finished at 8am on Christmas Eve and rested for a while. At 10 o’clock his mother sent him out to get the turkey for the next days festive dinner then, after another brief rest he went to see his girlfriend of three years.

His birthday had been the day before so he was due to meet some work colleagues for celebratory drinks at the famous Kytlers Inn in Kilkenny town itself. They met at 3.30 that afternoon and stayed until 8 when they were joined by his father and his brother. Hennessy and his family then went back to a pub nearer the family home in Windgap, Co. Kilkenny and the evening ended at the local, Guineys. Hennessy had now been drinking for 10 hours and was definitely the worse for wear.

When Guiney’s shut it’s doors at around 1.30 Hennessy and his sister headed back to his parents’ house but he soon left again, saying he had left his jacket at the pub. Revellers making their way home saw him weaving his way down the middle of the road in the direction of the pub but he never got there. He would later tell gardai that he decided to go looking for sex.

Sharon Whelan was the older sister of an ex girlfriend of his. The relationship had been short-lived, only two months some four years previously, and he only knew Sharon through that. There had never been a relationship between the two but he decided that the 30-year-old single mother was the one to satisfy his urges that night. He told gardai that he had bumped into her one day and she had told him he should call up to the house some time. He decided that Christmas Eve was to be the time.

Brian Hennessy is the only one who knows what happened when he knocked on Sharon Whelan’s door in the small hours of Christmas morning and he claims not to remember the exact details. Sharon Whelan’s body was found to have extensive bruising around the vaginal and anal areas and bruising to her face, legs and knees. She also had all the classic marks of strangulation, bruising to the throat, a broken hyoid bone and tiny pin point haemorrhage’s around the eyes and face.

Hennessy denies raping her. He told gardai that the sex was consensual, that she brought him into the bedroom she shared with her two daughters and that they had quite and gentle sex in the bed where her 7-year-old daughter Zsara was sleeping, while 2-year-old Nadia slept in a cot nearby. He says that afterwards, as he was leaving, Sharon threatened to tell the local gossips that they had slept together and he did not know what came over him. He strangled her to stop his girlfriend finding out. The prosecution contend that it wasn’t an illicit liaison she was threatening to tell about but a horrific rape and it was this secret he killed to protect.

Hennessy says he killed Sharon in the living room of the house. He described to gardai how he put his hands around her throat and squeezed for several minutes until she fell to the floor dead. He said he sat with her for several minutes deciding what to do before making up his mind to destroy all trace of his crime.

He said he took Sharon back into the bedroom and left her there. Then, using a cigarette lighter he found in his pocket he set fire to a pile of clothes left sitting on the kitchen table. He thought he had set another fire in the living room but couldn’t remember. Fire investigators discovered two clear seats of fire when they examined the gutted building.

Neighbours waking on Christmas morning saw smoke coming from the old farmhouse and raised the alarm. Hennessy had returned home at about 7 that morning and told his mother he had spent the night with friends. He was sleeping it off as Sharon, Zsara and Nadia’s bodies were pulled out of the burning building. All three were dead.

Sharon’s family were all in court today, to see her killer sentenced. She had been informally adopted, along with her brother and sister by Ann and Christopher Whelan, and had grown up with their five children. Her foster brother John took the witness stand today for an emotional victim impact statement.

He told Hennessy that it was obvious human life meant nothing to him. “It is beyond belief that anyone with any humanity or conscience could carry out such an act of pure evil” He had not only stolen the lives of three people who had gone to bed that night looking forward to Christmas but had ruined that time of year forever for all those who loved them. “Christmas for us is no more. It does not exist.”

He said that his parents had become shadows of their former selves, simply existing rather than living life in the wake of such bitter loss. The voices of the children playing in the local school serving as a daily reminder of the grandchildren they had lost. He said that the twice daily pilgrimages to the graves were all his parents had left. There was nothing that Hennessy could serve that would come close to righting that wrong.

Nadia’s father, Joseph Delahanty, spoke of the loss of his little girl, recently diagnosed as autistic, in a statement read to the court. Both families sobbed openly as the catalogue of loss was read out to the packed courtroom.

Handing down his sentence, Judge Barry White told Hennessy he had not been man enough to admit his guilty at an earlier stage to save the Whelan family the pain of court. Judge White told Hennessy that his actions had meant that Christmas, for all those connected to Sharon and her two daughters, would be a time of anguish, pain and grieving. He said that Hennessy’s stated remorse had not been enough to make him face up to what he had done before the case reached court.

Speaking outside the courthouse Sharon’s brother, John Whelan spoke of the family’s relief at the sentence.

A Book Recommendation

7th November 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

A former colleague of mine has just brought out a book on the trial of Ronnie Dunbar for the murder of Sligo teenager Melissa Mahon.

The Ronnie Dunbar trial was one of the most disturbing trials we’ve had in recent years. I wrote about it extensively here as I covered it for the Sunday Independent. Dunbar was a charismatic accused, an intense heavily tattooed figure who believed that one day he was to be the King of a new world order which he would rule with his dogs and his will.

He told his teenage daughters and Melissa that these tattoos could banish demons and ghosts. It was two years before Melissa’s skeleton remains were found on the shores of Lough Gill in Sligo, weathered by the elements and gnawed by wild animals. It was only then that Dunbar’s daughters came forward to tell a harrowing story of murder, terror and concealment that would form the basis for the prosecution case against their father.

Dunbar was the person that the vulnerable Melissa had run to when her fraught homelife was too much. Someone she trusted and looked up to…someone who she loved and allegedly told people was her lover.

Bronagh has set out the whole story of this extraordinary case. So if you want a good read…you know where to go.

Lively Debate

16th October 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Last night I went to the inaugural Insight Debate at the National College of Ireland. It’s not something I’d normally have gone to (my college days are long behind me and there never seems to be any time) but as the motion was “this house believes that the scales of justice are tilted towards the criminal” I made the effort.

Given the day job it was a subject that I’m more than familiar with and one that often comes up in the courts – prolonged exposure to the court beat tends to send people either to the right or the left so discussions can get heated. Even in the controlled circumstances of a formal debate structure like last night, things got heated.

The lecture theatre was packed and there were plenty of familiar faces dotted around. I was live tweeting the debate, trying to get as many of the main points as I could but once the discussion was opened to the floor it was almost impossible to keep up.

This is a subject that will always get people’s blood up. Crime is something that affects everyone living in a society and we can’t avoid the latest escapades of a bewildering array of miscreants that seem to keep some red tops in business. Now granted, for me, a substantial drop in the crime rate would be fairly disastrous for the bank balance but it’s impossible to sit through trial after trial, especially at Circuit Court level, without forming some opinions about whether or not the criminal justice system works or not.

As I said, it’s a topic that comes up fairly frequently among my colleagues and I’ve often heard the opinion that working the court beat can actually make you sleep safer in your bed. It really is a case of the devil you know. You realise that the gardai, for the most part, do their jobs well and there are a lot less miscarriages of justice than you might previously have thought. Even though I’ve written here about some of the more peculiar decisions that are made in the courts, the reason I comment on them is because they are peculiar.

More often than not once you’ve sat through the horrific details of some crime with the absolute certainty that the tattooed thug beside you did everything he was accused of and probably more, you have the satisfaction of seeing a conviction at the end of it. Juries might be subject to certain flights of lunacy on occasion but for the vast majority of the time the bad guys go to jail and the innocent men walk free. It doesn’t always work but it mostly does and it’s the safest system we have. Having 12 random men and women who will not look on court proceeding with the jaundiced eyes that familiarity can breed, is a hell of a lot fairer for all concerned than any alternative I can think of.

It was fascinating to watch the debate and hear the comments that came from the floor. Certain issues stood out through repitition and showed current preoccupations. Rather unsurprisingly the subject of white collar crime was a recurring theme. It seemed to be a general consensus that many in the audience, regardless of which side of the motion they came down on, would rather see the prisons full of bankers than many of the others who currently lodge there. I could be wrong but I think that every speaker made a crack about John O’Donoghue’s ignominious departure from the post of Ceann Comhairle earlier this week. I get the feeling though that jokes about expenses are going to be satirical currency for many months, if not years, to come.

The idea of treating those who end up in the criminal justice system through disadvantage and drug addiction with a degree of compassion is one you see a lot in the Circuit courts. The idea that there are people who wouldn’t commit crimes if they could kick the drugs comes easily if you listen to sentencing after sentencing where the defence mitigation speech sounds the same. Education for those in the lowest economic groups and access for treatment for those who become addicted to expensive drug habits with no way to support them, would appear to be a no brainer.

The idea that those involved in the criminal justice system need to be treated like human beings instead of numbers arose on both sides of the debate. The more vulnerable amoung those accused of crimes deserve a way to get themselves out of the hole they are in and the system needs it’s checks and balances to ensure that those accused of a crime get a properly fair trial. We’re back to the jury on this, and the presumption of innocence.

This presumption is the cornerstone of Irish justice. It’s the way we do things here and it’s a far more dignified way to treat those in the dock. Even the dock in Irish courts no longer exists so that the accused is not stigmatised by having a set place to sit. OK so in practice they all sit in the same place, that seat formally known as the dock, but the principal is there.

The presumption of innocence seems to be the hardest part for those affected by crime to grasp. Why should someone who you know has done you wrong, because you were there or because you know the facts of the case, get to be treated like an innocent man.

I know it can be difficult for victims families in a murder trial when the accused swans in through the Four Courts gates ahead of them each morning before the trial. They find it galling to watch the defence successfully exclude reams of evidence that make up part of the complex case the gardai have painstakingly built. I can’t comment on the wrongs and rights of the evidence and the bail but while a trial is ongoing all you can if you are there to see justice for your loved one, is trust that things will work out. Most of the time they do.

It must be hard to watch someone you believe to be guilty treated with kid gloves but better that than an innocent man treated like the devil himself.

The flip side of this issue, which was returned to time and again by both the audience and the team proposing the motion, is that of victims rights. Ger Philpott from Advocates for Victims of Homicide (AdVic), spoke movingly of his experiences of the justice system as he watched the trial of the men accused of the murder of his nephew Russell Deane.

I’ve seen mothers of those killed thrown out of the court for crying as the story of their child’s last moments is recounted to the court. I know why their displays of emotion don’t play well with the defence but it’s always one of the most awkward bits of a trial when it happens. Victims don’t really have a place in the prosecution of a case. If they weren’t around for the events leading to their relation’s death they might not even be called as a witness. Often the only thing they can do is provide a victim impact statement at the very end, once a conviction has been secured. I’ve seen some very nasty characters indeed milk their status as an innocent defendant as a blatant way of twisting the hearts of their victims even more.

Crime by it’s very nature hurts those it happens to. Those wounds run deep and the criminal justice system doesn’t always help the healing process – one of the points thrown up the the audience was that even data protection legislation conspires against victims of violent crime and their families. Under these rules the gardai are forbidden from passing on their details to some of the support groups set up expressly to help them.

It was perhaps inevitable that the ayes would have it and the motion would pass. Our justice system is a complex thing built over centuries, in need of modernisation and streamlining perhaps but for the moment it’s the one we have to work with. When we read about the criminal gangs who maim, kill and wreak lives, then terrify those who could be witnesses to send them away it’s hard not to feel that this world we live in is a dark one indeed. We can be passionate about human rights and justice but if crime comes into your life it’s hard to keep that objectivity. It was great to see the subject debated so thoroughly though. It’s always good to challenge viewpoints and I’ll look forward to the next debate with interest.

I’m just playing around with some of the ideas thrown out last night here. I’m not saying which side I voted for merely continuing the discussion. Feel free to join in!

The Ramblings of a Pompous Ass!

27th September 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

So Joe O’Reilly has been corresponding with the media. One can’t help but wonder what possessed him to enter into an exchange of letters with journalists from the Star Sunday. Has he not learnt by now that his proclamations of innocence continue to fall on deaf ears because most people in his country are too familiar with the facts of his wife’s brutal murder; she was bludgeoned to death so thoroughly that her blood spattered the ceiling above her body.

Today’s Star Sunday contains O’Reilly’s thoughts on his conviction and his life in jail. He comes across, not as an evil cold blooded killer but as a none too bright pompous snob who boasts about the book club he set up in the Midlands Prison and once again tries to talk his way out of murder in the way he has ever since his wife was killed.

During his 2007 trial it came out that O’Reilly was in the habit of blabbing to anyone who would listen. He commented to a friend that the gardai were looking in the wrong place for the murder weapon, ran through a blow-by-blow (excuse the pun) account of the murder for his wife’s family and talked to half the journalists in town about how he was the number one suspect.

Despite the fact that these tactics quite spectacularly failed to keep him out of jail, it appears that he still uses them. His dazzling critisism of the mobile phone evidence that placed him near the murder scene at the time was confused to say the least.

“I will leave you with these thoughts/questions. 1. Ever had a dropped call? 2. Ever lose your signal? Have you ever stretched your arm 800 yards down a hill, past a door, through two doors, turn left, down a hallway, left into a bedroom, kill someone then leave the way you came without being seen? No? Me either. But I HAVE dropped a call and I have lost a signal…SO, hardly water-tight technology eh?”

Brilliant! I’m sure the combined forces of the DPP and the Gardai are quaking in their boots at such brilliant point scoring! This is a man who genuinely thinks that he will be able to convince the journalists he is writing to, and presumably the public, that he loved his wife and was dead against domestic violence. He conveniently forgets that his mistress, Nikki Pelly has been a regular tabloid fixture since his conviction and that vitriolic emails about his wife that he sent to his sister were one of the highlights of the evidence against him.

O’Reilly is either delusional or so arrogant that he thinks his charm will wipe any previous knowledge from the minds of those he addresses. He obviously has some intelligence but not half as much as he thinks he has. What struck me about the article was not his claims about the flaws in the prosecution or his cheeky suggestion that whoever murdered Irene White must also have killed Rachel. The details that said most about the character of Joe O’Reilly were the priggish comments about films and books, details that reveal a snobbish idiot who crows about how only he and the prison librarian really enjoyed Barrack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

“That was one of the books a few of us read in here, as part of a small book club we have. That actually makes it sound more grandiose than it is. All the ‘book club’ is, is an initiative myself and a few others started up through the school and the library to get (well try to) people in here interested in books and reading. Then giving them a platform by which to give an opinion about the book for that month.”

So now we have the the crusading teacher of the less fortunate. The man’s idiocy truly knows no bounds.

These letters represent a massive coup for the Star Sunday. Fair play to them for getting him to talk but ultimately what today’s article shows is how little the unrepentant convict has to say. All you will hear when you talk to someone like Joe O’Reilly are justifications and obfuscations. He’s not going to suddenly admit what he did, so you are left with the surreal ravings of an insubstantial alibi. The same kind of idiocy that made O.J. Simpson write If I Did It. It’s arrogance and attention seeking at their worst. But it does make great copy!

A Case of “Mind Boggling Sadness”

4th February 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

This afternoon a Central Criminal Court jury found 25-year-old Dubliner Thomas Connors not guilty of killing the man he thought was the devil after less than an hours deliberation.

Over the course of the short trial they had heard that Connors had killed 30-year-old Michael Hughes in a savage attack with a pair of garden sheers that left the deceased with 143 injuries. He told gardai, phoned by neighbours who heard the screaming, that he had fought the devil and the devil was now gone.

Mr Hughes had been up visiting his cousin in Dublin from Offally. On the night he died, December 15th 2007, he had been out with his cousin and some friends. His cousin had gone home early and when Mr Hughes tried to get into the flat at Manor Villa in Mount Argos, Harolds Cross he couldn’t get an answer. Cutting his losses he decided to sleep on the stairwell but tragically Connors burst in through the glass doors of the apartment building with the shears and attacked him.

He had sought medical help on three occasion in the days leading to the killing. A schizophrenic, he was hearing voices and suffering the delusion that his wife was the daughter of the devil. His wife had been so frightened by his behaviour that she had taken their child and gone to a women’s shelter. On the first two visits Connors was not admitted although he was given tablets on his second attempt to get treatment.

Finally, the day before the killing, doctors in St Vincents Hospital decided he needed to be admitted but Connors was gone by the time an ambulance arrived to move him, four hours later. In the hours before the killing he became convinced that the devil was hiding in his apartment in the building beside the one Mr Hughes was staying in. Connors took his duvet outside and stabbed it because he thought the devil was hiding there. Some time later he happened on Mr Hughes.

Mr Justice George Birmingham told the jury that this was a case of “mind boggling sadness” and, if it hadn’t been for the issue of insanity, it would have been a perfectly clear and appalling case of murder.

Cases like this have become relatively commonplace before the courts since a change in the law in 2006 allowed the verdict of not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. Even though in cases like this the outcome has been agreed by all sides, the evidence must still be heard in front of a jury who must then decide if they accept the not guilty by reason of insanity plea.

The jury today accepted the views of the psychiatrists both sides presented them and apart from querying whether the accused having smoked cannabis before the killing was a factor, came back with their decision within an hour.

This isn’t always the way though. In last year’s trial of Henry McLaren, a paranoid schizophrenic who killed his uncle with an axe because he thought he was a devil (again). He insisted on calling himself Red, heard Jimmy Hendrix talking to him and thought Sinn Fein had killed all the American Indians.

McLaren too had a history of mental illness and was quite obviously still mentally ill. Even so the jury took almost three hours to find him guilty eventually only able to turn in a majority verdict.

I can almost understand the problem the McLaren jurors had with the process. It’s easy for those of us who are used to hearing these cases to see what does and doesn’t fall within the 2006 law. But for a jury, hearing details of almost unimaginable and invariably unprovoked violence, the idea that the person sitting on the bench opposite them is not responsible for his actions must sometimes be hard to swallow.

Add the that the knowledge that the person who carried out this often “frenzied” attack will not be handed a prison sentence but will instead be removed to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum for as long as it takes until he is deemed better.

I hasten to add here that in these cases the accused is unlikely to get released any time soon but I’m sure there are those who would find that still an insufficient punishment.

I’ve often wondered why the cases are heard in front of a jury at all. Why the judge can’t just decree the verdict as he would order an acquittal in a case of insufficient evidence. But once you’ve watched a few of these trial you see why. If someone is suffering from severe mental delusions they are absolutely not themselves and cannot be held accountable for their actions in any normal way.

Yes, when you listen to the progression of someone’s delusion you can frequently see a twisted logic of a sort running through the heart of it but that isn’t the same as the full understanding of the consequences of your actions. Of course they should get the care they need.

But also you realise that if a judge alone decided every not guilty by reason of insanity case the cries of injustice would be swift in coming. Just because someone is insane shouldn’t mean they lose the basic right to be judged by their peers. All you can do is make sure they have all the relevant information available to them.

There will always be some who disagree with the views of even the most eminent psychiatrist. Who think that someone hearing voices should just snap out of it and take responsibility but, as today’s jury obviously realised, insane is insane and there’s no point leaving someone to the mercies of the prison system who needs dedicated psychiatric care.

What is troubling about case of Thomas Connors, and that of Henry McLaren, is that they were both prediagnosed schizophrenics who had not been receiving the treatment they needed. If Thomas Connors had been admitted when he first sought help, Michael Hughes would still be alive. He would have been able to marry his fiancee and build the life that they were planning together.

I’m not saying that both killing were 100% avoidable, there’s no way of knowing that, but these are simply two cases where the psychiatric services were not available to someone who needed them and someone else died as a result. There’s already a huge stigma against mental illness in Ireland that means that people or even their families do not always seek out the help they require. Add to this an over stretched health service and it’s a recipe for such cases of “mind boggling sadness”.

The Books

Tags