The Court of Criminal Appeal has dismissed Brian Kearney’s appeal against his conviction for murdering his wife, Siobhan Kearney, in their Goatstown home in February 2006. The court upheld the trial judge’s rulings on three grounds of appeal, including the refusal to direct an acquittal. Kearney’s life sentence therefore remained in place; the court did not conduct a new trial.
The trial in the Central Criminal Court ended in March 2008 with a majority jury verdict convicting Kearney of murder. The appeal court heard the case in 2009 and delivered judgment on 9 October that year. The prosecution case relied on circumstantial evidence. Kearney argued on appeal that it was insufficient and failed to rule out the possibility that a third party had entered the house after he left for work.
The appeal court ruled that the trial judge had been entitled to admit evidence that Siobhan had kept a diary. Its contents were not put before the jury. The court found the diary relevant as evidence that she was seriously pursuing a separation, which the prosecution said supplied a possible motive. The court dismissed this ground of appeal.
Kearney also argued that evidence about Garda interviews conveyed to the jury that he had exercised his right to silence. The court found that questions left unanswered, or answered “no comment”, had been removed from interview records shown to the jury, and that records of interviews yielding nothing of evidential value had not been put before them. It said the jury had been directed not to draw adverse inferences from the interviews and rejected this ground.
The third challenge concerned the trial judge’s refusal to direct an acquittal at the end of the prosecution case. The appeal court said the application had focused narrowly on whether the evidence excluded the possibility that Siobhan was alive when Kearney left home. It upheld the ruling that the case could be considered by the jury on the combined circumstances, rather than the estimated time of death alone.
The appeal court said the circumstantial evidence, taken together, was capable of supporting the jury’s conclusion. It rejected the argument that the evidence was poor and dismissed the appeal in full.