The Court of Appeal has set aside Ciprian Grozavu’s conviction for the 2011 murder of Jonathan Duke and directed a retrial, finding that a trial judge’s response to a jury question could have made the verdict unsafe.
The court said jurors may have been left uncertain whether finding Grozavu guilty of manslaughter could affect the prosecution of his co-accused, Ms O’Connor, for murder in her separate trial. The court agreed that the appropriate answer to the jury’s question was “yes”: a manslaughter verdict in Grozavu’s case would not prejudice the verdict in O’Connor’s case.
The jury had asked whether, if it believed two people were involved in an unlawful killing, it could find one guilty of manslaughter without prejudicing the verdict in the other person’s case. The trial judge replied: “That’s a difficult one. You are only concerned with the case against Mr. Grozavu. You are only concerned with the case against him.” The Court of Appeal said the opening remark could have suggested there was no clear answer. It considered the response capable of causing confusion, potentially leading jurors to abandon or withhold a manslaughter verdict because they thought it might harm the case against O’Connor.
The appeal court rejected the other grounds raised. It found there was enough circumstantial evidence for the trial judge to leave the case to the jury. It also concluded that the judge’s direction on joint enterprise, followed by an instruction to disregard it, was unlikely to have confused or prejudiced the jury. The court said the “callous spectator” remark about Grozavu’s account of not intervening was an unfortunate choice of words, but did not undermine the trial’s fairness.
Grozavu had been convicted by a unanimous jury at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork in June 2013 and sentenced to life imprisonment the following month. The Court of Appeal set aside the murder verdict and ordered a retrial. Its judgment concerns only Duke’s murder conviction; the source says Grozavu separately appealed his conviction for the murder of John Forrester.