The Court of Criminal Appeal has refused Colm Maguire’s application for leave to appeal his conviction for membership of an unlawful organisation, finding that the trial court had adequate evidence to convict and had properly assessed his defence and Garda interview answers.
Maguire was convicted on 18 October 2006 and sentenced on 30 November 2006 to six years in prison. The appeal court, in a judgment delivered on 7 May 2008, considered nine grounds grouped around the weight given to a senior Garda officer’s belief evidence, the fairness of the trial, the handling of Maguire’s sworn denial and the drawing of inferences from his interview answers.
The court said the trial judges were entitled to accept the evidence of a Chief Superintendent that he believed Maguire was a member of the IRA. The legislation made that belief admissible evidence, and the appeal court said the trial judges had recognised that limits on examining the sources behind it affected its weight. The court found their approach to weighing that evidence acceptable.
Maguire’s counsel argued that the belief relied on anonymous information and that the trial process did not meet European fair-trial standards. The appeal court rejected that ground, saying the belief evidence was not the same as anonymous witness evidence and that the trial judges had not relied on it alone. It found no basis to conclude that they had misapplied the relevant domestic or European case law.
The appeal court also rejected the claims that the trial judges had failed to consider Maguire’s defence or wrongly treated his answers to Garda questions as misleading. It said the trial court had taken account of his sworn denial of IRA membership, but was entitled to find aspects of his evidence and interview answers implausible or false. Those answers could, in the circumstances, corroborate the Chief Superintendent’s belief evidence under the 1998 legislation. The appeal court noted that a person could not be convicted solely on inferences drawn from a failure to answer material questions.
The court did not decide whether a “Lucas-type” warning was required in the circumstances. It said there was no reason the issue could not have been raised in submissions at trial and rejected the argument that the judgment was deficient for not recording such a warning.
The court concluded that there was adequate evidence before the trial court and refused the application for leave to appeal. The judgment addresses that application; it does not set out a separate order allowing an appeal.