The High Court has extended the time for Philomena Coton to pursue a judicial review application seeking to prohibit her trial on charges arising from an alleged 1988 attack on her husband. The ruling allows her substantive arguments to be heard; it does not decide whether her trial should be stopped.
Coton faces charges of unlawfully and maliciously causing grievous bodily harm to Christopher Payne with intent to murder him, and with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. The prosecution alleges that four men entered the couple’s home on 13 May 1988 and beat Payne, who was seriously ill. It alleges that Coton and her daughter arranged the attack. Payne died on 28 November 1988, about six months later.
Coton was charged in January 2013 and returned for trial on 20 February that year. She received leave to bring judicial review proceedings on 18 December 2013, seeking prohibition on grounds of prosecutorial delay. The Director of Public Prosecutions argued that the application was out of time and that no extension had been sought when leave was granted.
The court held that, for an application to prohibit a criminal trial, the three-month time limit under Order 84 generally runs from the date the accused is returned for trial, rather than from service of the indictment. The judge said the indictment is commonly lodged on the trial date, while the accused has the Book of Evidence by the return-for-trial stage. An extension remains possible where the rule’s conditions are met.
The judge also said a delay issue can, in an appropriate case, be addressed at the leave hearing as a preliminary issue. That approach, the court said, could prevent applications brought well outside the time limit from requiring a full hearing on their merits.
Although the judge accepted that Coton’s case history provided a good and sufficient reason to extend time, the court also had to consider whether the circumstances behind the missed deadline were outside her control or could not reasonably have been anticipated. The judge noted that Coton had raised judicial review with her solicitor in June 2013, and that the possibility had not previously been specifically addressed by her legal advisers.
The court took account of past uncertainty about when the time limit began, the fact that the trial was not scheduled for many months, and the absence of suggested prejudice to the DPP or a third party. It also noted earlier High Court and Supreme Court findings in the daughter’s related case that the Garda investigation had been delayed.
The court extended time so the full arguments for prohibition could be heard. It expressly left open whether Coton’s own delay might later warrant refusing relief. No decision was made on the merits of the prosecutorial-delay challenge.