The Court of Appeal dismissed John Dundon’s and Wayne Dundon’s appeals against convictions and affirmed the convictions entered by the Special Criminal Court. It also refused Wayne Dundon leave to argue additional grounds and to adduce new evidence. The ruling did not reopen the trial or order a retrial.
John Dundon had been convicted of threatening April Collins at a Limerick address on 3 April 2011. He challenged the reliability of her identification and the trial court’s restriction on using prison telephone transcripts in cross-examination. The appeal court accepted that the trial court’s treatment of the identification issue was brief and could have been more detailed. But it held that the trial judges had heard the defence challenges, including a lengthy cross-examination, and were entitled to find the allegation proved beyond reasonable doubt. It also held that the transcripts had been provided for the limited purpose of checking whether Collins had said she would “stitch up” John Dundon. The defence was not entitled to use them freely for other topics. Those grounds failed.
Wayne Dundon’s proposed additional grounds concerned alleged missing CCTV footage, prison-call transcripts and an alleged benefit to April Collins connected with her evidence. The appeal court found no evidence that functioning cameras covered the relevant address on 30 September 2010 and accepted the prosecution’s position that no footage existed. It also rejected the claim that the phone-call material justified admitting new evidence. The court considered a call in which Alice Collins said Wayne Dundon had not threatened her “directly”, but found that the full exchange did not meet the threshold for admitting new evidence. It therefore refused leave to introduce that material and argue the additional grounds.
The court also rejected the proposed argument about Collins’s District Court road-traffic matters and her suspended sentence, describing the suggestion that she had received a benefit as lacking in reality. Separately, it said a previous Special Criminal Court had not rejected April Collins’s evidence in a murder trial; it had considered that her evidence did not advance the prosecution case there.
On the substantive appeal, Wayne Dundon challenged the reliability of Alice and Bianca Collins’s evidence about alleged threats, and April Collins’s evidence concerning witness intimidation. The appeal court said the trial judges were best placed to assess the witnesses, including after cross-examination. It found that evidence accepted by the Special Criminal Court could support the convictions and declined to substitute its view of the facts. Both appeals were dismissed and the convictions affirmed.