Gangster 'Fat' Freddie Thompson in bid to overturn murder conviction

A Dublin man serving a life sentence for the 2016 murder of a business owner has launched an appeal against his conviction at the Court of Appeal. The defendant was found guilty in 2018 at the Special Criminal Court of involvement in the killing of a 55-year-old man, who was shot multiple times at a shop on Bridgefoot Street in the capital on 1 July 2016. The appeal centred on the reliability of CCTV evidence used to identify the appellant in connection with a vehicle linked to the offence. The defence argued that the conviction should be overturned due to the absence of documented procedures governing how gardaí were instructed to view and identify individuals from the footage. The legal team contended that the lack of formal protocols stood in contrast to established practice in UK police investigations and raised questions about the identification process's integrity. The State's counsel countered that the CCTV evidence was of sufficient quality to enable reliable assessment and that the conviction would remain safe even without reliance on identification evidence derived from the footage. Prosecutors also submitted that recording individuals on public streets and roads during a murder investigation does not constitute a privacy breach. In her judgment, Justice Úna Ní Raifeartaigh dismissed all grounds of appeal. The judge found that the trial court had properly evaluated the CCTV footage's reliability and assigned it appropriate weight alongside other evidence presented during the trial. The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, rejecting the defence submissions on both procedural and substantive grounds. Three other men have previously received custodial sentences in connection with the same killing. The case was heard at the Special Criminal Court, which deals with offences of a scheduled nature, including those involving organised crime.