The Court of Appeal has dismissed Daniel Connors’s appeal against his convictions, despite finding a minor error in the trial judge’s summary of identification evidence. Applying the statutory proviso, it upheld the convictions notwithstanding that error.
The appeal concerned convictions returned by a jury at Clonmel Circuit Criminal Court in June 2016 for criminal damage, possession of stolen property and two counts of dangerous driving. Connors was sentenced to a cumulative seven years, with the final year conditionally suspended for two years. The judgment addressed the conviction appeal only; the sentence appeal was not decided in it.
The charges arose from events on 2 July 2015. The stolen property belonged to Pádraig Ryan and included a trailer, ride-on lawnmower and strimmer. Two detectives said they recognised Connors driving a jeep towing the trailer. They described a pursuit in which the jeep was driven at speed, made to stop suddenly and reversed towards the Garda car before the trailer was abandoned.
The appeal challenged the admission of the detectives’ recognition evidence, the possession charge, the trial judge’s handling of defence arguments and the safety of the verdict. The Court of Appeal found that the trial judge had enough evidence of the detectives’ prior knowledge of Connors to admit their recognition evidence. It said the judge’s comments about one detective’s credibility from earlier cases were inappropriate, but did not undermine that ruling.
On the possession charge, the court said the trial judge should also have allowed the jury to consider theft as an alternative verdict. The evidence could have supported a finding that Connors was involved in stealing the goods. However, the court upheld the possession conviction: the jury had been properly instructed on the offence, and could have concluded that the property was possessed after the theft was complete. The court said the question of when the theft was complete was for the jury on the facts.
The court rejected the other claims of unfairness, including arguments concerning the trial judge’s directions about the burden of proof and identification evidence. It did find that the judge had slightly overstated Detective Garda Cooke’s evidence by suggesting he had seen Connors in the relatively recent past. Cooke had referred to seeing him once, without specifying when. The court held that the error was accidental and unlikely to have affected the jury, and applied the statutory proviso to uphold the convictions.
The appeal was dismissed on all grounds except the complaint about that overstatement, which the court technically upheld while maintaining the convictions.