The Court of Appeal has dismissed Vincent Banks’s appeal against his conviction for membership of an organisation styling itself the Irish Republican Army, finding that the trial was satisfactory and the conviction safe.
Banks was convicted by the Special Criminal Court on 31 July 2017 of membership on 18 December 2012, contrary to section 21 of the Offences Against the State Act 1939. He was sentenced to five years in prison, dating from 16 April 2016. His appeal challenged the conviction, not a separate sentence ruling.
The appeal court rejected Banks’s arguments that an earlier arrest ruling barred the prosecution from revisiting the issue, or made the later trial unfair. In a separate trial on a withholding-information charge, the Special Criminal Court had ruled that his 18 December 2012 arrest under section 30 was unlawful. Banks was acquitted of that charge. The Court of Appeal said the arrest ruling was not binding in the later membership trial: the membership charge had not been before the earlier court, and the arrest ruling had no bearing on the withholding-information acquittal.
The appeal court also upheld the membership trial court’s finding that the December arrest was lawful without a section 30A warrant. It accepted the trial court’s assessment that the suspicion behind an earlier arrest in September 2012 concerned a different alleged membership offence from the one underlying the December arrest. The court said the trial court had correctly applied the test in an earlier Court of Appeal decision, which required an assessment of whether the circumstances giving rise to the later suspicion had arisen by the time of the earlier arrest.
Banks also challenged the admission of seven interviews: three conducted under ordinary caution and four in which police invoked section 2 of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998. The prosecution relied on answers it said were lies and on failures to answer material questions as support for a Chief Superintendent’s belief evidence. The appeal court found no error in admitting the interviews. It said Banks had access to legal advice and was informed of his right to silence; it also considered the explanations given before the section 2 interviews adequate overall, despite a misstatement of the provision in one interview.
The court rejected Banks’s challenges to the Chief Superintendent’s evidence that he believed Banks was an IRA member on 18 December 2012. It upheld a privilege claim over material underlying that belief, finding the claim legitimate, and said the restrictions on cross-examination did not make the trial unfair. It also agreed that the disputed answers in cross-examination did not go beyond material disclosed to the defence and were elicited by defence questions, distinguishing the circumstances from the case Banks cited.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. The conviction and five-year sentence therefore stood.