A Dublin man's attempt to have his conviction for murdering journalist Veronica Guerin declared a miscarriage of justice has been dismissed by the Court of Appeal as an "abuse of process".
Ms Guerin was murdered on the Naas Road on June 26th, 1996 while waiting at traffic lights. A motorcycle pulled up alongside her car and the pillion passenger discharged a number of shots.
Brian Meehan (47), from Crumlin, is serving a life sentence in Portlaoise prison for her muder having being convicted by the Special Criminal Court in July 1999. It was the prosecution's case that he drove the motorcycle.
Meehan had applied to quash his 1999 murder conviction on the basis of alleged new or newly discovered facts following an unsuccessful appeal against the conviction in 2006.
The alleged new evidence concerned matters which emerged in the course of the 2001 Special Criminal Court trial of John Gilligan, who was ultimately acquitted of Ms Guerin's murder.
Dismissing Meehan's application under section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act on Monday, Mr Justice George Birmingham said it was "entirely clear" that "no new fact or newly discovered fact" had been established.
It was abundantly clear, Mr Justice Birmingham said, that all of the material Meehan was seeking to rely upon now was available, at the latest, from the time of the Gilligan trial in 2001 and that the arguments he now presented had been formulated in detail by 2003.
He chose not to present those arguments before the Court of Criminal Appeal and the choices he made had “consequences”, the judge said.
‘Unacceptable’
To formulate grounds and arguments but not proceed with them and then seek to resurrect them years later as new facts is “quite unacceptable and indeed in the view of the court amounts to an abuse of process”.
Mr Justice Birmingham said the application had “morphed” from one based on alleged non-disclosure to one that was critical of his previous lawyers.
Where Meehan had to accept there had been disclosure, “he retreats” to a situation of saying his lawyers at trial did not appreciate the significance of the material that was disclosed. There was “no evidence to support that proposition whatsoever,” the judge said.
Meehan said he never wished to drop a motion to adduce additional evidence but his then lawyers told him he had to — although no affidavit was provided by the solicitor who acted for him in the appeal.
“Having one’s instructions terminated in one of the highest profile murder cases in the history of the State is not something that would be forgotten easily, even with the passage of time,” the judge said.
The fact a motion was brought to admit additional evidence was “the clearest possible, and indeed conclusive, evidence that the significance of the matters now sought to be relied upon were considered before” .
Transcripts
Furthermore, the judge said, Meehan had “operated on the basis that he can trawl through” transcripts, make a selection and then deploy the selected material. However, only in exceptional cases could that be permitted and this was “certainly not such an exceptional case”.
“Really this is a case where the appelant (Meehan) is saying that the approach of the Gilligan trial court is to be preferred to the approach of the court that dealt with his case.”
In doing so, he ignored the Supreme Court’s remarks on corroboration in relation to Gilligan, the judge said.
Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court was satisfied “not only that all of the material pointed to” by Meehan was “propertly disclosed to him and his legal team but also that its significance was fully appreciated by them, at the very least by the time of his appeal against conviction” in 2003.