The Supreme Court dismissed Patrick Blanchfield’s appeal against a High Court decision refusing to quash orders for access to bank records and refusing to halt his criminal proceedings over alleged delay. The Court did not decide whether the challenged orders were valid. It held that the Circuit Court could consider their validity if necessary when deciding whether evidence obtained under them should be admitted at trial.
The orders were made under the Bankers’ Books Evidence Acts, which provide for inspection and copying of bank records for legal proceedings. Blanchfield had run Abbey Financial Services in Kilkenny. From November 1994, gardaí received complaints of financial irregularities said to have caused losses to more than 30 people. The judgment records that the investigation involved 39 complaints and sums of about £1 million.
Blanchfield was first charged with forgery in December 1994. Between December 1994 and March 1995, District Judge William Harnett made about 20 orders allowing Detective Garda J Seymour to inspect and copy bank entries relating to accounts connected with Blanchfield. The first order was made on 6 December 1994, the day an arrest warrant issued and before Blanchfield was charged. In September 1996, Blanchfield was charged with eight offences of fraudulent conversion and forgery and sent forward for trial.
In judicial review proceedings, the High Court recorded the prosecution’s concession that 19 orders made between January and March 1995 had been made without jurisdiction because no District Court proceedings were then in being. The Supreme Court noted that the High Court had not ruled on the validity of those orders or on the challenges to the first and September 1996 groups. It treated possible invalidity as a hypothesis for deciding the appeal, rather than making its own ruling on validity.
The Supreme Court held that a criminal trial judge has power to assess the legality of procedures used to gather evidence, insofar as needed to decide admissibility or whether to exclude evidence. Any such ruling would apply for the purposes of that trial; it would not invalidate an order for all purposes. The Court also said that an unlawful order would not, by itself, determine whether the resulting evidence was admissible.
Although the bank-record orders concerned Blanchfield’s accounts and gave him an interest in challenging them, the Court upheld the High Court’s discretionary refusal to quash them before trial. It considered it preferable for the trial judge to hear the evidence and assess the issue in context. The Court also upheld the refusal to prohibit the prosecution: it found no warranted claim of culpable delay and said the investigation extended beyond the original charge and required information from multiple financial institutions.