CONCERN HAS been expressed by the most senior trial judge in the State at the fact that the victims of serious crime have to pass within inches of an accused person when giving evidence in the newly-opened Criminal Courts complex in Dublin.
Mr Justice Paul Carney said the new Criminal Courts complex had been widely hyped as “a victim-friendly building” with separate entrances and waiting areas for victims so they could avoid contact with an accused person.
However, to get to the witness box, a victim has to pass within inches of the accused in the open dock, and the tension is manifest when the witness is called to testify, he said. It would have been preferable to have the dock and witness box at opposite sides of the courtroom, he added.
Delivering a paper entitled “Victims of Crime and the Trial Process” at University College Cork, where he is adjunct professor of law, Mr Justice Carney highlighted the importance of maintaining the presumption of innocence while respecting the feelings of victims.
Stressing that he was not attacking victims, he said the current seating arrangements where victims sit directly behind junior counsel made it difficult to operate the concept of presumption of innocence in the face of what seemed to him the victims’ sustained disapproval for doing so.
He believed that in the new, spacious courtrooms, “the victims should be choreographed into seating which is out of the direct line of sight of the trial judge and jury – and by all means be brought to the fore after conviction for the sentencing phase”.
Mr Justice Carney said that, ideally, he should not be able to recognise who victims are during a trial process, but that once a conviction had been recorded, the victims could then properly give full expression to their feelings towards the accused.
He also expressed concern at “the practice had grown up of victims during the trial donning a uniform of white top and black clothes and walking arms linked the full length of the Four Courts for the television cameras”.
“There can be no objection to this after conviction, but I am referring to the currency of the trial. This must, in high-profile cases, have fused with the campaigns of certain newspapers to suggest the guilt of their favourite suspect so as to damage the presumption of innocence.”
He spoke of how a lot of victims might find his demeanour towards them as a judge “unsympathetic, if not downright discourteous”, but he went on to explain that there was “a good reason for this”.
“Where a trial judge described the mother of the deceased who was giving evidence in the trial, as herself, a victim, a judgment of McGuinness J, set aside two murder-related convictions on the ground that the mother’s evidence had been given a seal of approval by the trial judge.
“In the light of this judgment, a trial judge would not know what he was risking in extending even a basic courtesy towards a victim during the trial itself. Victims will not be aware of the pressures of this kind operating on the trial judge and think he is just being gratuitously cruel and unfeeling.”
