The Court of Criminal Appeal has rejected Alan Finnamore’s application for leave to appeal against his conviction for possessing amphetamine for sale or supply. It treated the leave application as the hearing and rejected all grounds. The court did not grant leave or quash the conviction.
Finnamore was convicted on a retrial of an offence under section 15A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977 and sentenced to eight years in prison. The court’s judgment, delivered by Macken J. on 1 July 2008, concerned whether he should be allowed to appeal that conviction.
The case arose from events in County Laois on 19 February 2003. The evidence at trial was that Finnamore was seen taking a bag from the car he was driving and putting it in a ditch. Gardaí arrested him and his nephew and found the bag, which contained amphetamine. Finnamore had initially been convicted of simple possession and two more serious drugs offences. In November 2005, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the convictions under sections 15 and 15A because it was not satisfied the jury had been free from pressure to return verdicts that evening. It upheld the simple-possession conviction.
At the retrial, the jury convicted Finnamore under section 15A. It returned no verdict on the section 15 charge. He received an eight-year sentence after the sentencing judge took account of the two-year sentence already served for simple possession. The Court of Criminal Appeal said that approach properly accounted for the earlier sentence and avoided double punishment.
Finnamore argued that his earlier conviction barred the retrial and that the jury should have considered the more serious charges before any lesser charge. The court said the offences were not the same or substantially the same for the purpose of a plea in bar. It also found that the retrial remained part of the continuing process on a single indictment after the earlier convictions were quashed. The court said any error in how the original jury considered the alternative charges could have been corrected at the appropriate time, but the issue had not been raised at trial or on the first appeal, and no credible explanation for that failure was offered.
The court also rejected arguments that the evidence did not establish possession or sufficiently prove the drugs’ identity, purity or market value. It noted that those issues had not been raised at trial. On the analysis, samples from 16 of 48 packages and a portion of loose powder contained amphetamine; the court held the jury could reasonably infer that the materials were the same. It also held that the evidence of street value, based on the total weight, was sufficient to support the statutory threshold for the section 15A offence.
The court rejected the application for leave to appeal and all grounds advanced.