The Court of Criminal Appeal refused Eamon Mathews’s applications for a certificate allowing an appeal to the Supreme Court and for a further ruling on an argument he said had not been addressed in an earlier decision.
The judgment, delivered by Macken J. on 29 March 2007, concerned two motions. The first sought a certificate under section 29 of the Courts of Justice Act 1924. Mathews proposed three questions for the Supreme Court, concerning the evidential weight of a Chief Superintendent’s belief evidence, the ability to cross-examine the witness about the basis for that belief under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Court of Criminal Appeal’s use of judgments issued after oral argument.
Mathews had been convicted by the Special Criminal Court in December 2004 of membership of an unlawful organisation and sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. The Court of Criminal Appeal had refused leave to appeal against conviction in July 2006. In considering the certificate request, it said the proposed questions had not been shown to raise points of law of exceptional public importance. It referred to the Supreme Court’s decision in DPP v Kelly and said the applicant had not argued that the legal analysis relied on by the earlier court was flawed or that relevant European case law undermined it.
On the third question, the court said it would be prudent in appropriate cases to invite further submissions when it intended to rely materially on a judgment delivered after oral argument. It nevertheless refused the certificate, finding no exceptional public importance in the question as it arose in Mathews’s case and no basis to refer it in the public interest.
The second motion sought a ruling on the treatment of evidence considered in two charges at trial. The trial court had dismissed an explosives possession charge, describing evidence as largely circumstantial and capable of an innocent interpretation, but convicted Mathews of membership of an illegal organisation. Mathews argued that the same evidence could not support the membership conviction after the acquittal on the explosives charge.
The Court of Criminal Appeal said the leave application’s Ground 4 raised the issue of whether issue estoppel applied in favour of an accused in Irish criminal law. It considered that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moran v Lynch—that issue estoppel did not operate in criminal law in favour of either the accused or the prosecution—disposed of that ground. The court said no independent ground had been raised about the meaning or effect of the phrase “capable of innocent interpretation”. It concluded that no additional judgment on those arguments was required.