The Court of Appeal has dismissed Gerard Hayes’s appeal against his conviction for murder, finding no reason to conclude that his trial was unsatisfactory or that the conviction was unsafe. It also refused permission to add a late ground arguing that the trial judge had told the jury a not guilty verdict was unavailable.
Hayes was convicted by a Central Criminal Court jury on 18 March 2003, following the January 2000 stabbing death of John Robinson. Hayes admitted stabbing Robinson but said at trial that he could not remember doing so. The jury rejected his partial defence of provocation and found him guilty of murder.
The appeal was heard in January 2018. The original appeal raised seven grounds, including challenges to the directions on provocation, the handling of evidence, and comments made by the trial judge. In 2017 the court allowed two further grounds concerning the absence of a complete trial transcript. Hayes later sought leave to add a tenth ground, based on prosecution solicitor’s notes indicating that the jury had been told a not guilty verdict was not open to them.
The official transcript was unavailable because the trial’s stenographic records and audio tapes had been destroyed. The court had an uncertified overnight transcript covering the evidence and earlier proceedings, plus contemporaneous notes by an unidentified prosecution solicitor covering the closing speeches and jury charge.
The court said the surviving material was adequate to decide the appeal. It noted that Hayes had waited more than nine years to take the procedural step needed to start his appeal and had contributed to the delay. The court considered that the available notes showed the jury had been directed on provocation and its subjective test. It dismissed the challenges to those directions and to the alleged failure to leave self-defence to the jury, noting that defence counsel had expressly said self-defence was not being advanced.
The court also dismissed challenges relating to a pre-trial application about prosecution witnesses and the trial judge’s comments when Hayes began giving evidence. It refused leave to add the tenth ground, without deciding definitively whether the jury direction described in the notes was legally wrong. The court said a not guilty verdict was not a realistic outcome on the evidence and that the alleged direction had caused no injustice in the circumstances.
The court therefore dismissed the appeal. The murder conviction remained in place.