Tag: Court Reporting (Page 3 of 17)

On Criticism…

22nd February 2011 / Abigail / 1 Comment

Nobody’s going to like everything you write. It’s one of those basic facts that come as a kick to the system the first time you get shot down in flames for putting an opinion into print. I still vividly remember the first time someone didn’t like something I’d written – it was many years ago on two weeks work experience for the Belfast Herald and Post. My editor had asked me to write a review of a book of poetry that had come in and, in my youthful enthusiasm I slated it. I think I used the word “pap”. These days I would never be so mean but back then I was just trying to make an impression.

Well I did make an impression. The poet was an avid reader of the paper, the local free sheet attached to the Belfast Telegraph. Within hours of the paper hitting people’s doormats he was on the phone. My editor made me take the call. The rest of the office burst out laughing as I turned puce and almost burst into tears because, to be honest, I had it coming.

These days I don’t do many reviews. I write about people’s lives, and more often than not people’s deaths. I try to be sensitive to the feelings of those I write about but I can’t do my job if I’m always pulling my punches.

I’ve worked in the courts for a long time now and I’m used to being careful about what I write. During a trial there are very clear reasons for doing this – it’s the law. We do our job under strict rules about what can be reported and what can’t. I must observe the accused’s presumption of innocence, make sure that any illicit googling from jury members doesn’t find anything prejudicial and I must respect the privacy of anyone under 18 or the accused or the victim of a sex crime. I can write anything that has been said in front of the jury as long as it’s within these rules. Until the verdict.

After the verdict – as long as it’s guilty- I can write with considerably more freedom. I can write about what happened when the jury were sent out of the court and any prior nefarious dealings of the convicted, as long as I get my facts right. I can also say what I think about the verdict or the trial. This is where people sometimes get upset.

I can only write what I see and comment on my own observations. I’ve sat through a great many trials over the years and watched an awful lot of men and women face the justice system. I’ve seen psychopaths and sociopaths and bewildered innocents, people who made a monstrous mistake that no backtracking could make go away, people whose worlds had ended in a split second. I’ve seen lovers and abusers, the dumped, the possessive, the controlling, those who acted in revenge, or defence, or rage. Like most of my colleagues in the courts, I can usually get a sense of how a trial will go at an early stage, there’s always one verdict that feels right, that seems to finish the unfolding story.

I will generally comment on a verdict only if it’s unexpected but when something doesn’t sit right it should be pointed out. The justice system is there for all of us and it has to work for people to have the necessary faith in it.

In the case of Marcio da Silva it was the defence that didn’t sit right. I’m not for a moment suggesting that da Silva’s legal team did anything but their job but the case they were putting forward was an uncomfortable one. I’ve written many, many times before about the fact that the only person missing from a murder trial is the victim. They are present as a collection of biological samples, a battered, fragile body – but everything that made them who they were in life is frozen in a frenzied, final moment, we hear other people’s memories, vested interests. We have no idea what their final thoughts were, how they felt as life slipped away, regretful, frightened, alone?

The accused is always in front of you during the trial but the deceased is a only blurred snapshot. They get some sort of voice during the victim impact statement, when their family have an opportunity to put the record straight and again on the steps of the court, with the flashguns blazing and the barrage of microphones. It’s the way it has to be to ensure that those accused of a crime maintain their presumption of innocence.

When the accused was emotionally involved with the deceased their silence is even more total. Women who have died at the hands of their partners are often portrayed in the negative. Before her husband was convicted of her manslaughter, Celine Cawley was painted the domineering bully. Josalita da Silva was the woman who manipulated men, used them to her own ends. The accused has the opportunity to put their case forward, the deceased does not.

So afterward, when the accused has been found guilty we can write about the deceased. Josalita da Silva died from more than 40 stab wounds. Marcio da Silva, her flat mate, had attacked her with no warning and no provocation other than her decision to spend the weekend elsewhere. She was sitting down, at her computer. He was standing at the kitchen counter by the knife stand. She was dying before she hit the floor.

The problem is that sometimes, when I say what I think, people don’t agree with me. That’s their prerogative of course but I draw the line when they question my professionalism or my integrity. I’m a long way away from slagging people off because I want to make an impression. I know I write about things that matter, life and death, I don’t do that casually. My job is to tell a story and I will tell it as I see it. I will take care to write within the law but I will not mince my words because they might offend.

A Line in the Sand

23rd November 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

This Thursday, November 25th, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It marks the start of a global campaign of 16 Days of Action. Here in Ireland the campaign is being spearheaded by Women’s Aid with events running around the country.

Working in the courts you see the grim effects of this violence on a daily basis. Any regular readers of this blog will know my views on sentencing for sex crimes and on the men who murder the women they are supposed to love. There has to be a proper line drawn in the sand to show that violence against women is utterly unacceptable. As long as men like Anton Mulder think they can get away with killing their wives with nothing more than a slap on the wrist that message hasn’t got through.

So many of the trials I’ve covered have been of men accused of killing women. Colleen Mulder, Karen Guinee, Rachel O’Reilly, Siobhan Kearney, Jean Gilbert, Celine Cawley and Sara Neligan all died at the hands of those who were supposed to love them. But it’s not just loved ones that kill. The list of victims can be added to, Melissa Mahon, Manuela Riedo, Mamie Walsh, Rebecca French; a litany of women killed by men. There are countless other women who can’t be named. Women who lived but who were subjected to such brutality that their lives have been shattered.

I’ve written a post over on The Anti-Room blog on the subject of sentencing for sex crimes. It’s an important issue. We need to draw that line in the sand and say it’s not acceptable if it’s ever going to stop.

A Question of Self Defence

8th November 2010 / Abigail / 5 Comments

Brendan O’Sullivan’s family started to sob as the jury filed back into the courtroom. O’Sullivan himself glanced over at his wife Claire whose eyes never left him as the verdict was read out, even as the tears started to stream down her face.

O’Sullivan, a 25-year-old father of two little girls, with an address at 10 O’Gorman St, Kilrush, Co. Clare had shot his neighbour Leslie Kenny four times in his own front garden. Kenny died at the scene. He had one shot to the right side, another to his right hip and, after O’Sullivan had reloaded the shotgun, shots to each knee.

O’Sullivan’s defence was that he had acted in panic to protect his wife and daughters after Kenny had threatened to slit their throats and burn the house down on a previous occasion. The gun, it was heard during his week long trial, had come from his cousin, taken in because she feared her estranged husband would use it to kill himself.

Kenny had a string of previous convictions, 82 of them for crimes like burglary and assault. He had been arrested on numerous occasions for the possession of dangerous weapons including knives, a hammer and a syringe. In the euphemistic terms often heard in court he was “known to gardai”. Witness after witness testified that he brought fear to the heart of the Kilrush community, threatening people refused to share their prescription drugs with him or who crossed him in any way. He was an “unpredictable” character, widely known and widely feared.

O’Sullivan’s sister in law had testified for the defence that Kenny and his girlfriend had climbed unbidden into the car in which she was sitting with her partner, outside the AIB in Kilrush. He had threatened to slit her nieces’ throats, she told the jury, and to pour petrol through the letterbox of the O’Sullivan house and light it while the family slept.

It’s a hard thing, here in Ireland, to speak ill of the dead. The instinct to gloss over old faults once life is extinguished is hardwired into the Irish psyche. But with this trial it had to be done. Kenny had to be painted as black as possible if O’Sullivan’s actions were to be seen with any compassion.

The prosecution case didn’t seek to mitigate the character of Leslie Kenny but argued that no matter how bad a man he may or may not have been, his death was not lawful and more than that, was premeditated and with murderous intent. They said that the shotgun Brendan O’Sullivan had got from his cousin was not being minded as a philanthropic act but was there for self defence. They said that O’Sullivan had lured Leslie Kenny into his front garden that June morning and had taken the opportunity to murder him.

They disputed the defence theory that the placing of the shots suggested that O’Sullivan had been unused to guns and had not expected the kick of the gun which took his shots to their mark. They said that the position of the wounds was consistent with O’Sullivan shooting as Kenny got up after the first shot and kept coming. Shots to stop an aggressor but not aimed to kill.

It took the jury less than three hours to come back with their verdict. Guilty of murder. There was a shocked silence in the courtroom as the verdict was read out then the sobbing intensified as O’Sullivan’s family and friends clustered around him to hug him before he was lead away to start a life sentence.

The decision was perhaps not such a surprise. While anyone could understand O’Sullivan’s fear for his young family, he had reloaded the gun, even if he had only shot Kenny in the knees with the second two shots. The legal crime of murder is defined in the negative. In Irish law an unlawful killing is not murder unless there is an intent to kill or cause serious harm. With that intent there is an assumption that the accused knew the logical and probable results of his or her actions.

Even so it wouldn’t be the first time an Irish jury had acquitted someone who defended their home with extreme lethal force. The case of Co. Mayo farmer Padraig Nally is the most obvious one that springs to mind. Back in 2005 he was convicted of the manslaughter of traveller John “Frog” Ward. Nally had been terrified of Ward and had sat waiting for him with a loaded gun.

When Ward came onto his farm he snapped. He beat Ward with a stick “like a badger” then shot him as he limped away. He was sentenced to six years in jail.

But in October 2006 Nally’s conviction was quashed with the appeal judges ruling that trial judge Mr Justice Paul Carney had been in the wrong when he had not allowed the jury to consider a defence of full self defence and had refused to allow them to reach a not guilty verdict.

The jury at the subsequent retrial did in fact find Nally not guilty and he is now a free man. Earlier this year the government introduced new legislation that would allow the public to use “justifiable force” against an intruder.

O’Sullivan’s case might not have fallen with a defence of the home scenario but it does share certain characteristics with the Nally case. Certainly, albeit having come into the trial late, I would have expected a manslaughter verdict rather than murder. Obviously the jury disagreed.

Just before lunch today there was an indication of the way they might have been thinking then they requested certain pieces of evidence to be brought into the jury room. They asked for a paper target found at O’Sullivan’s house and a mobile phone that had been found broken in a garda search during the investigation.

The problem was that neither the target nor the mobile phone were actually evidence in the case. They had been gathered up and tagged as part of the garda investigation but did not form part of the prosecution case. Once the jury were told they couldn’t have the items they were looking for and where sent to lunch the legal arguments began.

The defence wanted to know how on earth they had heard about the paper target, since it had not been in evidence. They feared that it showed the jury were speculating on events in a direction the prosecution case had not gone and so were not heading towards a verdict based on the evidence in the case. Just after lunch, before the jury were brought back to be formally sent to their deliberations, John Phelan SC, the defence senior counsel asked the the jury to be discharged.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy refused the submission and said that the jury should be trusted to do their job. He had earlier refused to recharge the jury on the options open to them, those of murder, manslaughter and acquittal as the defence felt that the jury would not understand from his initial charge that the option of acquittal was open to them.

It remains to be seen whether there will be an appeal and if there is whether it will be successful but it’s hard not to see certain similarities with the Padraig Nally case here.

Brendan O’Sullivan’s family looked utterly devastated at the news, no matter how hard the reloading of the gun might have been to explain to any jury. Outside the courts a short while after the verdict the family bumped into a small group of jurors, leaving after performing their civic duty. There were angry scenes as the two groups waited for traffic lights to change from green to red. Family members shouted at the jurors “He’s not guilty”. The jurors looked shaken and hurriedly backed away from the crossing. As the family moved away the jurors were in a huddle talking to one of the court gardai. Several of them were visibly upset.

They’ve come to their verdict and presumably did so in accordance with the vows they had charged. We have very strict rules in place to ensure that the jury’s verdict is inviolable and that’s as it should be. But when a jury reach a unanimous decision on a murder conviction in such a short time it’s for the rest of us to wonder how they reached that decision. It remains to be seen what an appeal brings but one thing an appeal will not do is question that decision. That’s the justice system we have.

The Face of Evil

4th October 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Today I watched the sentencing of a truly evil man. I don’t use the word lightly. I’m the first person to say that the word “evil” is misused in the media these days. It seems like anyone convicted of a violent crime will lumped in with the devil by tabloid subeditors. We have had evil rapists, evil wife killers, evil paedophiles presented to us with such regularity that the word has almost lost all meaning.

Take the cases of Larry Murphy and Gerald Barry for example. Murphy abducted a woman from the street and took her up to the Dublin mountains where he subjected her to a horrific rape. Barry killed Swiss student Manuela Riedo and raped a French student. Both cases were horrific, the type of crime that triggers some primeval fear, the threat of the unmotivated attack, the random motiveless crimes. Both men could be termed animals, monsters even, but evil is something different.

The word “evil” means something else. A more metaphysical threat beyond the ordinary. The ultimate black and white into which no grey is allowed. It’s something almost unimaginable, almost archetypal. Something beyond sheer brutality and horror.

Today’s sentencing was a case like that. In the years I’ve covered the criminal courts I’ve seen a lot of monstrous crimes, seen people convicted of murder and rape who I would have no hesitation in dubbing a psychopath but I would stop short of calling any of them evil. Irredeemable maybe, banged to rights certainly but not evil. That’s something else.

Well today was something else. The man in the dock was old and frail, approaching his 74th birthday. He wasn’t much to look at sitting huddled over his blue folder shuffling through the notes he had taken through the trial. He looked no different, no worse than any of the other paedophiles I’ve seen over the years, wizened old men the lot of them, accused by now grown up victims of crimes committed in the long lost depths of a shattered childhood. But this was different.

When I first started working in the courts I covered another trial with him at the centre. The victims then were two grown up women who he had abused when they were little girls in the 1970s. I hadn’t covered many trials back then and was shocked by what I heard but as repellent as the details were in that case this new trial brings things to a whole different level.

The victims now were three of his own children, who had not even been born when his previous crimes had taken place. They had ranged in age from 3 to 11 when the abuse occured. The courts had begun their summer break when the jury found him guilty of 87 counts against three of his children after a two month trial.

Today the litany of crimes was recited once again. The court heard that his son, who had been abused between the ages of three and six had been so traumatised by the constant assaults that took place when he went to the toilet that he became unable to use the bathroom. When he was taken into foster care he had been so traumatised that he would defecate into a drawer of clean clothes rather than do to the toilet.

Two of the man’s daughters had told the court how their father had repeatedly raped them, describing a perverted twisting of adult love making that their mother had done nothing to stop. The abuse had started when they were as young as four. He would tell them he loved them as he lay on top of them, ignoring their tears and pleas to stop. He told one of them that this was just what fathers did.

Even when the HSE was notified and the children were taken into care, even when the man was charged with the offences so many years ago and the legal machinery had slowly started to move into action, the abuse did not stop.

One daughter described him banging on her window after she had been taken into care and persuading her to run away with him. When the girls ran away he raped them; in the disabled toilet in a McDonalds; on the ground in view of the boats in Howth; in another toilet in a shopping centre. One girl described how on the DART to Howth he had spread his jacket over their knees and abused her.

Both girls read victim impact statements to the court. Addressing her father one said that she had loved and trusted him, believed him when he told her he loved her best. It had all been lies, she said. She had blamed herself when she was taken into care, she had written, but it had been his fault.

She had lost her family, she said, had been separated from her brothers and sisters and now no longer knew them. When she was 16 she had found herself in a violent relationship but could not leave because she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. The memory of what he had done to her was like “a shadow that won’t go away” she said. She still wakes up screaming.

She begged the judge to give her father a long sentence so she could feel safe again.

Her sister described how giving evidence during the trial had been “like being abused again”. She told the court that she hated the part of her that was related to her father and the part of her that had been abused. All that was left was a shell. “”I would have been better off if he had have killed me.”

Passing sentence Mr Justice Bermingham said it was hard to imagine a more serious offence. He said the rapes of the girls, after they had been taken into care, while their father had ignored the moves taken to stop the abuse, were at the worst end of the scale. The maximum sentence of life imprisonment was not one to be given lightly he told the court but these crimes warranted it. The man will start his life sentence when his current ten year term ends. With a degenerative heart condition and his advanced age there is a good chance that he will die in jail.

The two girls looked shell-shocked as the sentence was handed down but their father barely flinched. He shrugged at his legal team and did not look at his daughters agonised faces.

The man cannot be identified, since to do so would also identify his children who deserve to have a chance to try to rebuild their lives in peace now that their father is locked away from them. They have suffered horrendously at his hands and have been left feeling that no one, not those closest to them, nor the gardai nor well meaning social workers could save them. Hopefully one day they will have some measure of peace and will know that at least some kind of justice has been done.

Their father is the only example of pure unadulterated evil I have ever seen. A devious and manipulative man who tries to bend the law to suit himself and has never at any stage shown the least sign of remorse, the coldest, most ruthless type of pervert who would use his own children for his own sexual gratification. He’s not a sick man, a twisted, depraved one maybe, but even the psychiatric report furnished by his own defence team could not find any mitigating mental dysfunction.

A fiend like that defies understanding. There was no unhappy childhood, no history of childhood abuse so commonly heard in defence submissions in cases like this. This man was and is an ice cold manipulator, a genuine monster who has destroyed those he should have protected. He really is the face of evil.

A Menace to Society?

12th August 2010 / Abigail / 1 Comment

The first photographers arrived outside Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin at some point in the middle of yesterday afternoon. Their numbers swelled as the afternoon and evening wore on as they were joined by their colleagues and crime reporters from the various media outlets. By this morning there were around 30 eagerly awaiting the release of the man who is currently Public Enemy Number 1, convicted rapist Larry Murphy.

Shortly before 10.30 the doors of the prison opened and Murphy walked out, ignoring the press and the few assembled members of the public, to get into a waiting taxi and drive away into something that doesn’t remotely resemble obscurity. Apparently he managed to lose the following press posse but he won’t avoid them for long. According to reports on Twitter one of the Irish tabloids has posted his photograph all over his native Baltinglass asking for anyone seeing him to call the paper with the details.

Murphy’s release has been a national obsession for days now. While the flames of media interest might have been somewhat fanned by the summer lull in newsworthy stories it’s a valid cause for concern. Even if the crowd waiting outside Arbour Hill prison might have called to mind Chris Morris’s notorious Brass Eye Paedophilia Special (which featured material about a child molester disguised as a house and an angry crowd outside a prison tearing another paedophile to bloody pieces – in the name of satire rather than news coverage I hasten to add) Murphy’s release is a frightening prospect.

Let’s take a moment to go over why he served 10 and a half years in jail (and I’ll get to the length of time he served in a bit). He abducted a woman he had never met, bundled her into the boot of his car, took her up to the Wicklow Mountains and raped her repeatedly. When he was surprised by two huntsmen, who miraculously arrived and saved the woman, he was trying to suffocate his victim with a plastic bag.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but because of the clause in Irish law that allows any prisoner the particularly juicy carrot of between a quarter and a third off their sentence if they keep their nose clean in jail, he’s out after 10 and a half. Murphy refused to take part in any kind of rehabilitation in jail but that wasn’t part of the deal. So he’s out and the press are on his tail.

From now on he’ll have to tell gardai where he is and what he’s doing, but since there’s nothing like America’s Megan’s Law here in Ireland the general public won’t share that information. Granted there’s a very good chance that if he so much as sneezes for the foreseeable future it’ll be on the front pages of the next days papers but that interest will wane as soon as the next story comes along. He’ll make the front pages if he strikes again but that isn’t going to make any of us sleep better in our beds.

Murphy isn’t a unique case. There are plenty of vicious rapists serving time in Irish prisons and some are even up for release soon. Back in June one of them, Michael Murray, who raped four women over six days in 1995, actually went to the High Court complaining that he couldn’t lead a normal life because of the constant hounding by the press. Murray had undergone counselling in prison but even his own counsel admitted he was an “abnormal menace” to the community. Murray was unsuccessful in his action but you only have to look at the criticism that gets thrown at the press with every high profile trial, or even, as I’ve found out, any book about a high profile trial, to see that it’s by no means a given that any future case would get the same ruling.

Yes the press get excited about people like Murphy and Murray getting out of prison. Yes sometimes the coverage can get a little over the top. But ultimately the press are only doing their jobs. Things that make people feel unsafe make good stories and sell newspapers and I’m sure over the next few weeks we’ll hear arguments for some of the more shameless red tops that a public service is being done.

The problem is that it’s really not their job to keep an eye on dangers to society. It’s something they’ll do but for very different reasons from the ones such a job should be undertaken for. I’m a great believer in an ethical press and think that a strong media is necessary to protect society from corruption and injustice but I’m also a realist. There will always be other reasons why something like this makes a good story. A lot of those reasons have very little to do with altruism or ethics. Do this job long enough and the cynicism comes naturally.

The people who should be keeping an eye on people like Murphy are not the press but the gardai. The problem with that is that with the best will in the world, the gardai are unlikely to be up to that particular job. They can’t shadow Murphy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and they’re going to have to rely on him to cooperate with them to keep tabs on him any other way.

The real problem with this mess is that this point has been reached so soon. Ten and a half years is not a long time for such a brutal rape – but then rape sentences in this country are usually on the short side. I’ve written here at length in the past on the subject of rape sentences and once again I’ll say they are too short.

Generally speaking it’s only the very brutal rapes that make the headlines. While the media will be all over this case, where an Irishman has carried out a brutal attack on an Irish woman, they have been a lot less quick to cover equally nasty rapes involving an accused and a victim from outside Ireland. I’ve covered enough rape trials for news agencies to know how depressing it can be to write copy about horrific events day after day and send them out to every newsroom only to have your work ignored time and time again. Unfortunately familiarity breeds contempt. Newspapers want news and court cases tend to be too repetitive to give that newness. As a reading public we won’t read the same stories over and over again so why should the papers publish them?

There’s also the issue of sensitivity of course. The fact that rape trial reporting is a tricky business with the need to ensure anonymity of both accused and victim for the duration of the trial at least, doesn’t help matters. Consequently it tends to be only the most brutal, the most scary and predatory attackers that make the headlines. Only the most shocking cases. There are a great many more trials that go on without a murmur and whose sentences are not remarked upon.

When someone like Murphy gets out after ten years there’s an outcry, and there should be but this is a problem that is there all the time. Rape sentences are frequently under ten years. Life sentences are rarely given and when they are more often than not over turned on appeal. That needs to change. Someone who kidnapped a woman and threatened to kill them should have been sentenced to a lot more than 15 years. If someone’s a menace they should be taken off the streets until they are no longer a mess.

Instead we offer carrots to people who don’t deserve them, a light at the end of the tunnel for people who only deserve to see the light from an oncoming train. I’m thinking in particular of Gerald Barry, sentenced to two life sentences last December for the rape of a French student less than two months before he went on to brutally murder Swiss student Manuela Riedo. When he was handing out sentence Mr. Justice Paul Carney mentioned the quarter off saying that Barry was a perfect illustration of why it should be discretionary.

Surely it’s time we gave judges the power to set the upper limit of a sentence for serious crimes? The Court of Criminal Appeal would always be there but why can’t trial judges decide, like their English counterparts, that someone convicted of rape or murder should serve a minimum amount of time behind bars. You will never hear of someone being sent to prison for “at least 35 years” from an Irish court because the judges are not allowed to do that. They pass their sentences according to very strict rules. I can see why those rules are there but there has to be more flexibility to punish those guilty of the worst crimes this society has seen. There would still be the freedom to decide on a case by case basis. If someone is found guilty of an inconceivably horrific crime the courts should be able to ensure they never see freedom again.

If someone is going to remain a serious threat to society they should not be allowed back into it, even if that means holding them in continuing custody “just in case”. I’m well aware of the human rights side of this, and the fact that our prisons are already overcrowded and our courts are working more efficiently than ever, but beside all of this there has to be justice. There are certain crimes where the punishment should be life and there should be the freedom to ensure that life does mean life. As it is we will see the same circus as we have today the next time someone particularly nasty walks free while still in the prime of life. It’s not up to the press to shout about the unfairness of it all, it’s something that needs to be changed as a matter of policy, not a kneejerk reaction or vote catching sop. Until then there will be too many victims who feel that justice wasn’t served and too many women afraid of real bogeymen.

Facts and Figures

21st July 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

The Courts Service today released their Annual Report for 2009. As usual it’s always an interesting read for those of us who work down there. Apart from seeing in black and white how busy it actually was it’s interesting to put things in some kind of context, to see the breakdown of what actually happened in cool columns of statistics rather than the blur of day to day reporting.

It came as no surprise that murders were at their highest level in eight years. Last year was a pretty hectic one. 53 murders were sent to the Central Criminal Court in 2009 of which 49 were dealt with. There were 15 guilty pleas leaving 31 cases to go to trial. Of those 31, three defendants were found not guilty by reason of insanity, one was acquitted and the rest were convicted – which rather puts the lie to the assumption that the majority of murder trials end in acquittal, certainly not my experience.

There were 18 convictions of murder and 22 convictions for other offences, including manslaughter. If those figures don’t seem to add up that would be because the not guilty by reason of insanity verdicts would still result in some form of detention, usually to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum.

The 18 murder convictions all received the mandatory life sentence as did one of the manslaughter verdicts (Ronald Dunbar, who was convicted of the killing of Sligo teenager Melissa Mahon – his appeal is due to be heard soon.) There were another ten sentences of ten years or more.

Looking over the trials I covered last year those figures mean a lot of trials that went under the radar. For every David Bourke, Ronnie Dunbar or Gerald Barry there many more trials that didn’t peak the media attention and were heard without the fanfare that the high profile trials get. I’ve written before about the trials that go uncommented. I know there’s been a lot of criticism in recent years of the level of press attention that turns certain murder trials into cause celebres but the flip side of that is that those that lose their lives get their stories told. I couldn’t list off the names of the defendants in the trials I didn’t cover, let alone the victims.

The only type of criminal trial that was down in numbers was rape down 37% from the 2008 figure of 78. Before you get excited that’s not as positive as it sounds. There were still 52 cases in front of the courts. 18 ended with guilty pleas but 25 went forward to trial. Of the 21 sentences imposed there were 3 life sentences, 5 over 12 years and the rest between 5 and 12 years.

I’ve written at length here in the past about the low sentencing for sex crimes in this country and these figures bear that out. Rape isn’t an offence that has an inbuilt lesser charge like the majority of murder trials. You are either guilty or you’re not. To give someone convicted of rape a mere five years is ridiculously lenient. I’ve covered a lot of rape trials in the past and I’m well aware that there are different degrees of aggression involved but rape is rape.

Of the life sentences given last year, two of them were to the same person, Gerald Barry. He had already been convicted of the brutal murder of Swiss student Manuela Riedo in Galway and was later sentenced on two counts of rape for his hauntingly similar attack on a French student only a few short weeks before he killed Manuela. I was at that sentencing in Galway. Judge Paul Carney told Barry that he had no hesitation giving him life sentences on both counts and expressed the view that for someone like him the carrot of the automatic quarter off his sentence that every prisoner receives was a waste of time.

But this means that only one other rapist was given a life sentence, the maximum any of the others received was 12 years. Life is the maximum sentence that can be given for rape but based on these figures you’d pretty much have to go on to kill to be given it. But I digress.

In the Circuit Court the bulk of the cases were theft and robbery. Up by 28% since 2008, there were over 1500 dealt with. The next largest category was assault, up 5% to 1100, followed by drugs offences, approaching the 1000 mark and up by a depressing 23%. The most shocking jump is the rise in child abuse and child trafficking offences, up from 10 in 2008 to 397 last year, although this leap was due to just two cases each involving over 180 individual offences. However it was only earlier this month that an international report slammed Ireland for it’s record combating child trafficking.

Apart from the crime figures, the main focus of press attention on the report has been concerning the massive increase in debt matters. Bankruptcies were up by over 100% at 17 and there were almost 70% more orders to have businesses wound up – 128 in total. This section of the report makes depressing but rather unsurprising reading for anyone who’s picked up a paper over the past twelve months or so. Numbers in every area have risen except for new businesses – rather unsurprisingly there weren’t as many people looking to take out restaurant or hotel licenses last year.

The grim economic climate has even made itself felt on matters of the heart. Divorce, separations and annulments are all down on 2008 as are applications for quickie marriages. Domestic violence applications are down as well though you can’t help wondering how representative those figures really are.

The Court Service Annual Report always gives an interesting reflection of the state of the country. It might be a reflection of a moment in time some distance away, given the time things take to get to court but it’s an overview of life that’s difficult to see anywhere else. The courts reflect the darker sides of society, the rotting underbelly that’s frequently hidden from our gaze. Looking at these figures might give us a slightly twisted view of the world we live in but it’s an accurate one nonetheless and says a lot about where we are, or at least have been, as a country.

A Question of Taste

6th July 2010 / Abigail / 1 Comment

I’ve spent a large proportion of my time over the past fortnight talking about the dead. This is nothing unusual, I’ve worked in the courts for over four years now and tend to be seen as the oracle on all that’s gory for family and friends. You would not believe the number of people who want to hear about what poisons cause heart failure or the finer details of any of a dozen high profile murders.

There’s a fascination in this country for the macabre. We’re fascinated by death, the more violent or tragic the better. That doesn’t make us a nation of ghouls though, just one with an interest in our fellow man. It’s normal to be interested in your neighbours – who doesn’t take the opportunity to look into a curtainless window as you walk down the street? In a country where the rituals of birth and death still hold such a social resonance we all know that it’s at those moments you see people at their most unguarded – there’s a light on as well as the curtains being open.

For the past fortnight though I haven’t been talking about death in general, it’s been one death in particular. Not the death of someone I ever met in the flesh, or one that left a hole in my own life but one that I know the tiniest details of nonetheless.

That’s what happens when you cover a murder trial, you get the details – all the details. That’s why people have always and will always be fascinated in them. You watch a trial like that and you will find out details that you might not know about your spouse. The post mortem will tell you each mole and childhood scar, you might not know what that person was like to go for a pint with, say, but you will have more idea of a personality that you could have had in several casual meetings.

It’s a clinical kind of knowledge though, removed, academic. You will even go away knowing that most private moment that comes to us all, the moment, the ultimate instance of death, the last breath. A moment that loved ones might have missed will be examined in minute detail in front of strangers. That’s the reality of the trial process and that’s part of the attraction of this kind of trial.

Of course not all trials attract the same kind of scrutiny and people like me don’t end up writing books about them. I spent several years working for Ireland International News Agency. It was my job, and is still the job for those who still work there, to provide agency copy for the print and broadcast media on every murder and manslaughter trial before the courts. Starting off you don’t cover the big trials.

For every trial that sets editor’s pulses racing there will be a dozen that don’t. Those are the trials that the media don’t bother about, that appear as a side bar on page 11 or 12 of a paper. The acts of random violence, the young men from disadvantaged backgrounds who settle a disagreement a knife. The drunken rows, the senseless attacks, the depressing monotony of lives that were blighted before they were properly begun. These aren’t the trials you gossip about at the water cooler, these are the depressing meat of the criminal justice system, the ones that pass unnoticed.

The public don’t bother going to those trials, the papers don’t bother to cover them. Life after life is lost in obscurity, amounting to nothing but a violent sordid death. If the agency reporter doesn’t sit quietly for every day of the trial, filing copy that no one will use unless it’s a really quiet news day, no one will hear the details of that life and death except those directly involved and the lawyers.

No one cares about those trials happening in public. They are a depressing reminder of how cheap life can be and a side of humanity no one wants to hold a mirror before. But with the big trials it’s different. There’s something about the story that’s being told that raises it above the ordinary, a whiff of celebrity, a kink of weirdness, a view into a life in some way surprising.

The media cover these trials because the public want to know about them. It’s these stories I get asked about by friends, family and neighbours. The one’s that in some way rise up out of the norm and become the stuff of thrillers instead of a grim reminder of the briefness of existence. The protagonists are often rich, or if not rich at least possessed of some quality that separates them from the hot headed boys who get tanked up and stab their mates. It’s that factor that provides a distance so we can look at the sordid details as a story, a plot, rather than another human being meeting death before their time.

In recent years the refrain has been that these unusual trials are cropping up too frequently, that the public interest is being pumped by the hungry media and they are being led astray. I know a lot of people would think that I am also guilty of fanning that particular forest fire with this book, throwing my cap in the ring and exploiting the grief of the bereaved.

Anyone who thinks that is of course entitled to their opinion but it’s one I will take exception to if it’s put to me. I don’t consider what I do to be voyeuristic and I don’t consider my colleagues to be doing anything other than satisfying a public demand, which is the way newspapers have always worked and always will. When I write about a trial I’m not doing it to be ghoulish I’m doing it because it’s what I do.

I’ve always felt that it’s important that trials are written about, that in some way I’m helping with the whole constitutional imperative that justice be done in public, disseminating what goes on in the courtroom, bringing an informed reading to proceedings couched in arcane methodology and convoluted terminology and giving a voice in a way to those that can’t speak for themselves. I think that the media have a place within the courts and one that should be recognised and respected without accusing us of voyeurism and bad taste.

When I write about a trial I will try to show respect for everyone involved. For the dead who cannot speak and also those on trial, for the families of both and the witnesses who have to relive the traumatic past. Everyone I work with does the same. We might have a feel for a story that sells but that’s part of the business and part of our jobs and it’s not incompatible with respect and compassion.

Of course sometimes, when push comes to shove that balance gets skewed. There are times when the media scrum seethes forward and shoves us all into an unflattering spotlight. There are times when the excitement about a story gets out of control and enthusiasm for the job can seem like callousness and poor taste. It’s hard to explain news sense to someone who’s never had to find a story but it’s ingrained in most journos and can sometimes make us lose the head a bit but does not make us bad human beings.

Even in the heel of the hunt we don’t forget that we are dealing with death, that there are grieving family members and traumatised witnesses. It’s just that our job is not to wrap them in cotton wool – it’s to tell the story as it unfolds. All I can do when I talk about the deaths I’ve seen dissected is to talk about them with compassion, it’s got nothing to do with taste.

A Matter of Convention

5th July 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

I’m still whizzing round on the publicity merry-go-round for the new book this week. Today started off with back to back interviews and a reminder that even when you’ve a few interviews under your belt at a time like this you can still get that curve ball thrown at you when you least expect it.

My second interview of the morning was with Declan Meade on the Morning Show on East Coast FM. I’d been in to talk to Declan when Devil came out so it was nice to be back. at the end of the interview he asked me a question that had honestly never occurred to me before (an achievement since I’ve been eating, breathing and sleeping this book since the trial in January). Why, he asked me, had I referred in the book to Celine Cawley as “Celine” while referring to Eamonn Lillis as “Lillis”.

When you write a true crime book there are a lot of things to take into consideration. Quite apart from the fact you have to make sure you get the legal end of things absolutely right and double, and triple check all the factual details there are other, more subtle considerations. The language you use must be evocative but you’re not writing a work of fiction, it’s a record of an event, a tragic event that has traumatised all those touched by it and that has to be taken into account.

One of the most basic things that you have to decide on are what to refer to the principal characters as. In a court report of an ongoing trial there are conventions that you tend to stick to. Witnesses, the deceased and the accused are all referred to by their surname with the appropriate title before hand. Sometimes, to avoid confusion, say if numerous members of the same family are giving evidence you might resort to first names for clarity but for the most part its the formal title followed by surname.

When you’re writing a book or even a more fluid kind of article this form of address doesn’t always work. It can sound clunky and artificial. So you’re left with a choice. Do you use first names or surnames. Forenames can sound overly familiar but can feel like a natural choice when you’re talking about the victim, someone to be viewed with sympathy and compassion whose place in the story is to have a tragic ending.

For the convicted however it’s the flip side. Once they’re marked a killer by the decision of a jury they often lose their title, to be referred to ever after by their surname only. Referring to them by their first name just wouldn’t sound right, so they become the surname with an extra dose of ignominy.

It’s not a hard and fast rule of course. It can depend on the house style of the publisher or publication you’re writing for, sometimes everyone gets the surname approach although it’s generally not the other way around.

When I was asked the question I wondered briefly was I actually calling Celine Cawley by her first name because she was a woman. I know that when I was writing Devil and when I’ve written about both cases on this blog it’s been first names all the way. I don’t think it’s as simple as that though. I frequently refer to people who’ve played principal parts in the trials I’ve covered by their first names, mainly because I write in a more informal style here and it just sounds better.

There might be an element as well of the fact that when I’m writing about a case in depth it’s very hard not to develop a distance from the subject as you chisel the words into shape. I know when I’ve written true crime I think about the people and situations I’m describing in much the same way I would think about characters and plots when I write fiction. I’m aware that I’m talking about real events but to shape them into book form I need to treat them in the same way I would the raw material for any other kind of book.

It was a question that really got me thinking – always great when that happens. I’d love to hear what you think on the subject, weigh in with your own thoughts please – I’m perhaps too close to the subject by now and can’t see the wood from the trees.

Conflicting Stories

23rd June 2010 / Abigail / 2 Comments

Veronica McGrath rubbed her face hard. Today was her third day on the stand and the tension in the courtroom was palpable. Through hours of cross examination from barristers representing both her mother and her ex husband she had steadfastly stuck to her account of what happened the day her father met a violent end.

Facing her was her husband’s barrister, Conor Devally SC. His questioning had started gently enough, a break after the more antagonistic approach of Patrick Gageby SC, defending her mother. She frowned through the early memories of the early days of her relationship with her ex, Colin Pinder, who denies murdering her father Brendan Brian McGrath in the spring of 1987 but admits his manslaughter.

She had been living in a bedsit in Liverpool, a teenage runaway out of touch with her dysfunctional family. This flat had been broken into and Pinder had come in like a knight in shining armour and whisked her away to the safety of his flat a couple of streets away. That first night he had given her his bed and slept on the couch but it wasn’t long before a romance developed.

Ms McGrath denied telling him that the rift with her family was the fault of her father, a former inmate of the Artane Industrial School now grown into a man of violent rages and the suggestion of madness. She had also denied conspiring with her mother to have her father committed to St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital, clinging instead to the idea that her father was fair and reasoned man who had no problem with anyone. It would have been unfair, she agreed from the stand, to tell stories which resulted in her father being sent away for a week in St Loman’s.

Mr Devally had turned to the details of the night of her father’s death, by her own account a horrific, brutal event carried out by her mother and her fiancé. Mr Devally put an alternative scenario to her. That her father had taken exception to her choice of mate when she and Mr Pinder had returned to Ireland shortly before they were due to marry. She was adamant that she had never heard her father say that he would never have a “darkie” staying under his roof.

She absolutely denied the account put to her, his client’s instructions Mr Devally explained, that her father had come home on the night her died to find Colin Pinder in his kitchen. So unhappy was he about the thought of his daughter’s future husband that he had arranged for the caravan they were staying in to be towed to a neighbours land miles away from the house.

She denied that her father was so angry to find Pinder in his kitchen that he had lost his temper and attempted to throw him out, that Pinder had hit him – hard – and that he had fallen and hit his head on the kitchen range.

She denied that all three had been convinced he was dead and taken the “body” outside only to see her father rise like Lazarus. She again denied her and her mother urging Pinder to finish the deed and taking up arms themselves when he refused. It was absolutely not true,she said ,that she and her mother had threatened that he would never see the child he thought she was expecting if he told anyone.

She will have to face a third day of gruelling cross examination tomorrow. Her fourth day in the stand.

Blood & Mucus on A Midsummer’s Day

21st June 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

The sun was shining today. Here in Dublin that’s no means a guarantee at this time of year, even on Midsummer’s Day. Sitting in the Criminal Courts of Justice you can see the lucid blue of the sky, see the sun on the backs of the birds that flew past and on the motes of dust that hung over the judge’s wig.

But what we were listening to this afternoon conjured images that jarred with the serenity of that blue outside the squares of glass. In a quiet, hesitant voice, touching her hand frequently to her face or lacing her fingers nervously together, Veronica McGrath described how she had watched her mother and fiancé brutally assault her father.

I’ve not been back to court since the Drimnagh screwdriver trial and recently I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the launch of the new book, Death on the Hill. Today though the day to day business of the courts ground on despite the sun, regardless of any distractions or outside concerns.

It’s the second day of this trial. A cold case from 1987. Bernard Brian McGrath is the deceased and his wife Vera and former son-in-law Colin Pinder are accused of his murder.

His eldest daughter, another Vera, today gave her account of his death. She described how she and Pinder were due to marry in April 1987. They had moved back from England, where they had met and had been living together sometime in February or March and were living in a caravan beside the family home as they prepared for the wedding. She was 18 years old, Pinder a few years older.

But from their little love nest they could hear the nightly rows that marked her parents unhappy marriage. When a neighbour visited with a hitch on his car they took the opportunity to move the caravan to a field beside another neighbour.

She had no real problem with her father she insisted, despite the constant pressing from her mother’s counsel Patrick Gageby SC. She had no memory of complaining of his violence towards her to her local GP although she did remember visits from the doctor, the local priest and the gardai at various times during her childhood. She could also remember going to stay, with her mother and three younger brothers in a women’s refuge on the Howth Road in Dublin.

However, when her mother visited one evening, some time in March or April, and said she wished her father dead, Veronica didn’t think anything of it. It was a common sentiment, she told the court. Nothing to worry about. She heard her mother tell her fiancé that he was not man enough to kill Mr McGrath and she heard her fiancé answer that he had just the thing to carry out the dead. A heavy spanner, perhaps a torque wrench.

She and Pinder accompanied her parents back to the “home place” later that night, just for a cup of tea and a chat. The back door was locked so her mother climbed in through a bedroom window and opened the door. During the original investigation she told detectives that her father had refused to do the gallant thing when he was asked, telling her mother to do it herself, if she was so fit.

Then it all happened so fast. Pinder produced the hammer and brought it down on her father’s head. She said she heard her dog, tied up in the back field, barking unhappily so she went to calm it. She didn’t see what happened next but when she came back down her father was lying face down.

He wasn’t dead though. Veronica told the jury that her mother went into the house and came out with additional weapons, a lump hammer and a slash hook. She gave them to Pinder. Veronica said her father managed to get up and made a run for the small boreen, a narrow road, little more than a lane, that ran beside the house. Pinder slashed him in the thigh with the slash hook as he ran. She went and sat down the garden. She thought she had her teddy bear with her.

Her father ran to the ditch that ran along the side of the boreen where the trees hung down low. Pinder was hitting the bank of the ditch with the slash hook but wasn’t making contact with her father. She jumped down into the ditch and her father said to her that his eyes were stinging, he couldn’t see.

He pleaded for his life, asked for mercy, asked for his car keys and promised to drive out of their lives and leave them the house. The attack moved back the house. Veronica said it was there her mother hit her father with the lump hammer. She didn’t know where she had hit, but said her mother and her fiancé had laughed at the blow.

Her father was lying face down at the back of the house, near the garage. She could hear him making a gurgling noise. Her mother told her that was the “death rattle”. Later when he was dead, her mother and fiancé carried him up to the back field wrapped in a grey blanket. They buried him in a shallow grave.

She didn’t remember going to sleep but must have. The next morning her mother shook her awake where she was sitting in a kitchen chair and told her there was cleaning to be done. The ground outside was covered with blood and mucus and her three young brothers were still asleep upstairs. She helped her mother clean up the blood and, at her mother’s instigation daubed tar on the wall where the porous stone had sucked up too much blood.

Shortly afterwards she and Pinder got married in a registry office in nearby Mullingar. After the wedding her mother took her three brothers to England for a couple of months and she stayed in the home place with her husband. When her mother returned the body was revisited. The shallow grave was not sufficient, Veronica said. Her mother and husband dug up her father’s body and lit a fire. The body burned over several days. The smell on the first day was horrible. Visiting the field during that time she saw her father’s rib cage in the embers.

Eventually the fire went out. Her husband raked through the ashes with a shovel and brought fragments of bone back to the house in a biscuit tin. Some went in the range in the kitchen, some went in the septic tank.

The marriage did not last. The following year, when her son was still new born, Pinder went back to his native Liverpool. She did not see him again. Some time later she, as well as her mother and three brothers, moved back to England.

Six years later she couldn’t live with the secret any longer. She told a social worker what had happened and was put in touch with the police who contacted the gardai. A search of her parents house discovered the remnants of the fire and bone fragments missed in the charred ashes.

It wasn’t until 2008 that the bones could be formally indentified and her mother and former husband were charged. She’ll continue her evidence tomorrow as the sun continues to shine. The wheels of justice don’t stop turning for a spell of good weather.

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