Kevin Myers: The rape and murder of Bettina Poeschel by Michael Murphy should have prompted a public outcry, with serious questions over our judicial system. It has done neither.
Here was a serial offender who had repeatedly attacked women, yet had no suspended sentence hanging over him. He had been released from jail upon no licence, and was not even on a sex offenders' list.
Murphy is an evil and uncontrollable beast. When he was 22, in his home town of Drogheda, he grabbed 65-year-old Catherine Carroll on her way home, and began throttling her. She fell to the ground, shouting for help. Using his thumbs, he shoved her tongue back into her throat, forcing her dentures out of her mouth, choking her throughout. She finally died from inhaling, and drowning in, her own vomit. Then he stole her purse and walked away. Shortly afterwards, he told a man he had just killed a woman. A garda who interviewed him 20 minutes later said he was not drunk.
No evidence in defence was given. An uncontested and unproven statement from the defendant to gardaí that he had drunk seven pints of beer and 11 shorts before the killing was presented in court as the defence. This enabled defending counsel Patrick MacEntee to declare that his client was so drunk that he was incapable forming an intent to kill, that he was "utterly irrational, and not interpreting reality". The trial judge, Mr Justice Costello, told the jury that if they considered Murphy was so intoxicated that that he was incapable of knowing he was doing something dangerous, then the necessary intent for the crime of murder was absent. Yet no-one who saw Murphy at the time thought he was so intoxicated that he was incapable of knowing what he was doing. The reverse was the truth: he was sentient enough to know he had killed a woman. Yet the jury, incredibly, opted for manslaughter, and Murphy was sentenced to 12 years.
He was released in 1992. Five years later, still in Drogheda, he attacked two women, again pulling them both by the neck into an alley-way. For this, he got only six months in jail - which is, again, frankly incredible. At different times, he engaged in armed robbery and larceny, but had picked up such modest terms of imprisonment that he was free to rape and kill poor Bettina Poeschel in 2001.
Had he been found guilty of murder in 1984, subsequent offences - and with this creature, there were always going to be other offences - would have merited far higher sentences than they got. At his trial, a self-exculpatory pre-trial statement that could not be challenged - because he didn't give evidence - was accepted, changing the conviction from what it should have been, murder, to manslaughter.
Drogheda was also the home of another piece of filth, Michael Hodgins, who shot dead Tim Kidman, a gamekeeper at Slane Castle, in September 1989. Both he and his accomplice, Shane O'Brien, made similar statements to gardaí. In essence these vile creatures agreed that Tim Kidman had found them poaching with a rifle. O'Brien told Hodgins to shoot the gamekeeper, and Hodgins obliged. Tim Kidman fell, then got up. Hodgins shot him again. Tim ran away, chased by our two heroes, before falling onto a concrete slab. Hodgins finished him off with a single shot to the head, from a foot away.
Dr John Harbinson, the state pathologist, testified that the fatal shot was fired through the top of the head. A very brave young girl, Kerry Tully, testified that O'Brien, clearly not too grief-stricken, had described to her at a disco, later on the day of the shooting, how Terence Kidman had been pleading for mercy before he was shot.
However, unlike Murphy, O'Brien and Hodgins testified in court, and declared their statements were untrue. O'Brien, who for some reason had not been charged with trespass, poaching, accessory to murder, or conspiring to pervert the course of justice by helping to hide the dead body, then walked free, with no punishment whatever. None. Hodgins told the court he had fired five shots "in panic" at the gamekeeper. One was the final, fatal shot. Others had hit the chest, the jaw, with one into each arm.
Five shots fired: five hit home. Some panic.
Unbelievably, the jury found him guilty merely of manslaughter, and he got 12 years. So here, statements to gardaí - such as Murphy's defence had so vitally used to persuade the jury of manslaughter - were assessed by the jury to have absolutely no value. Also of no apparent value was the evidence of the State pathologist and of Kerry Tully.
Two Drogheda "manslaughters", but no justice done. How is it possible that such testamentary inconsistencies are tolerated in the name of the defence when they would almost certainly not be tolerated in the name of the prosecution? How could the details of Murphy's alcoholic consumption, unsupported by any sworn, independent evidence, be accepted as truth? Equally, how could comparable statements describing the cold and methodical killing of Tim Kidman be considered as worthless?
Common sense is insulted by such conclusions, and a monumental injustice is done both to the rights of the dead and of their loved ones, confirming the widespread sense that only those who are accused of crimes are of any account. Our courts have fetishised the rights of the accused, but the rights of the victims of crime are lost in a lawyerly babble. The price of such chronic failings was paid by Bettina Poeschel.