The Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Glen Geasley’s application for leave to appeal against his conviction, holding that the trial judge had correctly admitted recordings of telephone conversations with undercover officers. The court said the trial judge was bound to apply the legislation in force, despite an earlier appeal decision interpreting a superseded version of the law.
Geasley pleaded guilty on the ninth day of his trial at Cork Circuit Criminal Court in February 2008 to conspiring with others to possess firearms for an unlawful purpose. The Director of Public Prosecutions accepted the plea and entered a nolle prosequi on the remaining counts. He was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment, with five years suspended.
The prosecution case concerned an alleged plan to obtain a large cache of weapons for people involved in organised crime in Limerick. Two officers from the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, using the cover names John and Raj, posed as arms dealers and met Geasley at a London warehouse. They later spoke with him on mobile phones supplied for their contact. Geasley challenged the admissibility of those conversations, arguing that the trial judge had wrongly declined to follow the Court of Criminal Appeal’s 2002 decision in DPP v Dillon.
The appeal court explained that Dillon had considered an earlier definition of “interception” in the Postal and Telecommunications Services Act 1983. That provision had been replaced by the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulations) Act 1993. Under the amended provision, the court said, a person’s consent to listening to or recording a conversation meant there was no interception for the purposes of the relevant section. The officers had consented to receiving and recording their conversations with Geasley.
The court held that Dillon was not binding on the amended provision because it had interpreted statutory wording that was no longer in force. It said the trial judge was entitled, and bound, to give effect to legislation passed by the Oireachtas. The court also said the conversations would have been distinguishable from Dillon, where the caller intended to speak to someone other than the officer who answered.
Geasley had argued that the ruling left him no option but to plead guilty. The court said a guilty plea does not automatically bar an application for leave to appeal, but the applicant had not established the fundamental legal error on which his application depended. It therefore rejected the application on that ground and said he could not maintain his other appeal grounds. The court dismissed the application for leave to appeal; it did not order a retrial.