The Court of Criminal Appeal refused an application by Brendan O’Sullivan for a certificate that would allow him to appeal his murder conviction to the Supreme Court.
O’Sullivan was convicted by a jury in the Central Criminal Court on 8 November 2010, after a six-day trial. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his application for leave to appeal the conviction on 4 June 2013. He then sought a certificate under section 29 of the Courts of Justice Act 1924, as amended.
His proposed question concerned whether a trial judge must always give a jury a particular direction when partial self-defence is raised in a murder case. The wording he relied on came from the headnote to People (Attorney General) v Dwyer: where a person defending against a violent and felonious attack uses more force than reasonably necessary, but no more than he honestly believes necessary, the jury should return a manslaughter verdict.
In its earlier appeal decision, the court said the trial judge’s direction could have been better expressed if it had followed the Dwyer wording fully. But, considering the charge as a whole, it found it was not deficient.
In the present application, the court said its earlier decision applied established self-defence principles to the facts and did not determine a point of law, much less one of exceptional public importance. It also noted that the proposed direction assumed a violent and felonious attack, for which, the court said, there was no evidence in this case.
The court said it would dismiss the application for a certificate. It added that, even if the issue had been decided in O’Sullivan’s favour, it would have affirmed the conviction because it considered that no miscarriage of justice had occurred. Among the reasons it gave were that the deceased was unarmed and had been shot four times with a shotgun; eyewitnesses did not support a claim that O’Sullivan acted in self-defence; and the self-defence account depended on statements he made in Garda interviews. The court also referred to his later admission that allegations about the deceased chasing and threatening his wife and children were untrue, and said the jury was overwhelmingly likely to have rejected self-defence altogether.