The Court of Appeal has dismissed Peter Kenny’s appeal against his conviction for the murder of John Carroll, ruling that it was not persuaded the trial was unsatisfactory or that the verdict was unsafe.
Kenny was convicted after a trial concerning the shooting of Carroll in Grumpy Jack’s public house in Dublin’s Coombe area on 18 February 2009. The prosecution alleged that Kenny was the passenger on a motorcycle who entered the pub and shot Carroll. The appeal judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Birmingham on 20 February 2018, addressed several grounds of appeal.
The court rejected Kenny’s argument that Joseph O’Brien’s evidence should have been excluded because of O’Brien’s past contacts with Gardaí and the circumstances in which he gave statements after his arrest. The Court of Appeal said O’Brien’s earlier contact with Gardaí, outside the formal informant system, could not itself justify excluding his evidence. It acknowledged that a meeting with senior Gardaí was not recorded and that returning about €3,000 seized from O’Brien was wrong. But those matters did not require the trial to be halted or the evidence withdrawn from the jury.
Kenny also sought to introduce evidence from a later retrial that O’Brien had admitted the money came from drug proceeds. The appeal court refused the application, reasoning that this later admission did not undermine the safety of Kenny’s conviction. It said the jury at Kenny’s trial could not have believed the money belonged to O’Brien’s girlfriend, Emma Walsh, or represented her savings. The court considered the later admission, if anything, served to restore O’Brien’s credibility.
The appeal court also dismissed challenges over the refusal of a separate trial and the admission of subscriber information for a mobile number registered in Kenny’s name. It said the evidence about a past physical altercation between Kenny and O’Brien did not justify severing the trial. On the phone evidence, the court found no substance in the objection and noted other testimony connecting the number with a taxi call.
A further ground concerned a significant error in the trial judge’s initial direction on corroboration. The judge corrected the direction the following morning, explaining the mistake and setting out how the jury should assess the evidence. The appeal court found the correction likely to have been effective and dismissed that ground. It therefore dismissed Kenny’s appeal against conviction.