The Supreme Court has overturned Zoltan Almasi’s murder conviction and ordered a retrial, ruling that the trial jury should have been allowed to consider the partial defence of provocation. It also found errors in the editing of Garda interview material and in the exclusion of evidence about the deceased’s conduct earlier that day.
The Court stressed that the jury at a retrial could reject provocation and return the original murder verdict. It made no finding that Almasi acted under provocation or that he was not guilty.
Almasi was convicted of murder in the Central Criminal Court on 10 March 2016 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in 2018. The Supreme Court heard his appeal on three issues: the refusal to leave provocation to the jury, the editing of interview memoranda, and the exclusion of evidence about the deceased’s demeanour and conduct before the fatal encounter.
The killing followed an incident outside Almasi’s home in Naas, Co Kildare, on 16 May 2014. The judgment’s account, drawn from the trial transcript and expressly described as indicative rather than findings of fact, says the deceased, Joseph Dunne, struck Almasi’s van. Almasi took a baseball bat and chased him. The fatal blow was not captured on CCTV. The jury’s verdict established that Almasi struck Dunne on the head with the bat and killed him.
The Supreme Court held that the trial judge had applied the wrong approach to provocation. The question was whether evidence could allow a reasonable jury, properly directed, to find that Almasi had suffered a sudden and temporary loss of self-control and intentionally killed as a result of provocation. The Court said the evidence had “some air of reality” and that assessing the defence was for the jury. It noted that the events unfolded within about 11 minutes, while acknowledging that what was said and how the confrontation developed remained unclear.
The Court also ruled that extensive edits to Almasi’s interviews were unjustified. Gardaí had made comments suggesting the death might have been accidental or understandable, and those comments were removed while some of Almasi’s answers remained. The Court said the rules of evidence did not permit relevant interview material to be cut because it might harm the prosecution case. A judge could instead tell jurors that Gardaí’s views were not evidence and that they must decide the case on the evidence.
Separately, the Court found that evidence from a witness who said Dunne had smashed a beer bottle near the canal about 75 minutes before the encounter should not have been excluded solely as irrelevant or as an attack on his character. Its relevance was for the trial judge to assess in the context of the provocation defence; its weight, if admitted, would be for the jury. The judgment noted that Dunne had not threatened Almasi with the glass or used it against his van.
Because of the trial judge’s errors, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial.