The Court of Criminal Appeal refused Thomas Hickey and Jeremiah Hickey leave to appeal their convictions in a case alleging a conspiracy to defraud the Minister for Agriculture of herd depopulation compensation.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Finnegan on 9 November 2007, says the applicants are father and son. They were charged over an alleged plan, between 1 August and 31 October 1996, to place a BSE-infected animal in James Sutton’s herd. The alleged aim was to have cattle destroyed on ministerial order so compensation would be paid. The appeal judgment does not state the trial verdicts or sentences.
The applicants’ four grounds of appeal were that the trial judge appeared biased, referred incorrectly to part of a witness statement, gave an excessively long charge to the jury, and wrongly admitted evidence under section 5 of the Criminal Evidence Act 1992. Their applications for leave had previously been refused by the trial judge.
On the bias claim, the appeal court considered six incidents, including the judge’s questioning of a witness about when the applicants’ trailer had been left at a garage, her handling of an allegation of jury contamination, and comments after jurors said they felt intimidated by Jeremiah Hickey. The court found no basis for a reasonable apprehension that the applicants would not receive a fair hearing from an impartial judge. It said the judge’s question about the trailer clarified the evidence and benefited the defence, and that her investigation of the jury allegation had no identified inadequacy.
The judge had mistakenly referred during her charge to part of a statement by Sutton that had not been opened to the jury, but corrected the error. The appeal court found the correction adequate.
The jury charge was delivered over six court days, with interruptions for legal submissions and the jury-contamination issue. The court accepted that it was overlong, but concluded it was not liable to confuse the jury about the law, evidence or inferences available.
The final ground concerned a document combining information from two mobile-phone computer systems. The court said the underlying computer records and printouts met the statutory requirements for business records and permanent legible reproduction. The combined document was an abstract of those printouts and was not itself adduced as evidence.
The court concluded that neither applicant had established any of the appeal grounds and refused leave to appeal.