The Supreme Court has dismissed appeals by Cicero Pires, James Corrigan and Paul Gannon, leaving in place the Court of Appeal’s dismissal of their challenges to a High Court ruling on the lawfulness of their arrests.
The cases arose from separate prosecutions for road traffic offences. In each, the District Court judge found the arrest unlawful because the use of handcuffs was not objectively justified. The ruling meant evidence obtained following the arrests was inadmissible, and the cases were dismissed without a decision on their merits.
The Director of Public Prosecutions challenged those rulings by case stated, a procedure for referring a point of law from the District Court to the High Court. The High Court answered “No” to the question of whether the District Court judge was correct in law to find the arrests unlawful. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appellants’ appeals against that decision. The Supreme Court granted leave to appeal on the scope of the case stated procedure and the application of its earlier decision in DPP v Cullen.
Delivering judgment on 23 October 2018, Ms Justice Dunne said the case stated procedure is limited to questions of law and does not give the High Court a general power to reconsider a District Court judge’s factual findings. However, deciding whether the Cullen principles were correctly applied to the facts raised a question of law, so the procedure was properly used.
In Cullen, the Supreme Court found that handcuffing was unlawful where an officer followed a blanket policy without considering the circumstances or the individual’s behaviour and demeanour. Dunne said Cullen also required the officer to make an individual judgment about whether handcuffs were necessary, taking account of the circumstances. Courts should allow Gardaí a generous measure of judgment and should be slow to review operational decisions, while recognising that only force reasonable in the circumstances may be used.
The District Court judge had found that the officers’ decisions were bona fide and not part of a blanket policy, but concluded the handcuffing lacked objective justification. Dunne said Cullen did not require handcuffing to be objectively justified in that way. The judge had applied an objective test without giving the officers’ individual judgments the latitude required by Cullen.
Dunne accepted that the High Court judge had erred in commenting on how regularly the District Court judge found handcuffing unlawful: there was no evidence establishing that rate. She said the error did not undermine the High Court’s conclusion. The Supreme Court dismissed the appeals, holding that the Cullen principles had been misconstrued.