The Court of Appeal has dismissed all grounds of Jonathan Douglas’s appeal against his conviction for murdering Aidan Byrne, leaving his conviction and life sentence in place.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Mahon on 21 December 2015, concerned a conviction returned by a jury at the Central Criminal Court on 23 July 2012. The jury found Douglas guilty by an 11-to-one majority. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
The prosecution case was that Douglas shot Byrne ten times while Byrne sat in the front passenger seat of a car on Drumalee Avenue, Dublin, on 20 February 2010. Byrne died after being taken to the Mater Hospital. These were allegations presented at trial, not new findings made by the Court of Appeal.
The appeal focused in part on statements made to gardaí by Stacey Douglas, the appellant’s step-niece, and her partner, Andrew Sheridan. Their statements described the appellant arriving at their Dublin home after the shooting, washing his hands and showing a gun. At trial, both witnesses disputed the statements’ truthfulness or voluntariness. The trial judge admitted the statements under section 16 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006 after hearing evidence in a voir dire. The Court of Appeal held that he was entitled to admit them and that the jury had been adequately directed to consider their unsworn nature, the circumstances in which they were made and their weight.
The appellant also challenged a garda witness’s reference to a “gangland murder”. The trial judge told the jury the term should not have been used and directed them to decide the case on the evidence. The appeal court concluded that the prompt direction was likely to have removed any risk of prejudice.
The court rejected the argument that the two witnesses should have been treated as accomplices and that the jury required a mandatory accomplice warning. It said they had no involvement in the murder, and that their efforts to repudiate their statements weakened the suggestion that they should be treated as accomplices for that purpose.
The Court of Appeal also upheld the trial judge’s refusal to discharge the jury. It acknowledged that the judge’s reasons for admitting the statements lacked detail, particularly in response to the defence submissions, but found no basis to overturn the decision. The appeal was dismissed in full.