The Court of Appeal has upheld David Hunter’s conviction for the murder of Michael Barr, who was shot dead at the Sunset House pub on Summerhill Parade in Dublin in April 2016.
Hunter was convicted by the Special Criminal Court in September 2020 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The prosecution case was circumstantial and relied heavily on DNA recovered from masks found in the getaway car, mobile phone evidence and Hunter’s own prepared statement.
Mr Barr was shot after two masked gunmen entered the pub shortly after 8.30pm on April 25, 2016. They fled in a silver Audi A6, which was abandoned and set on fire minutes later at Walsh Road in Drumcondra. Gardaí recovered firearms, masks and clothing from the car.
DNA matching Hunter was found on a ski mask and a latex mask recovered from the vehicle. The trial court rejected his explanation that he had left the ski mask behind during an earlier visit to Dublin and that his DNA had later transferred accidentally to the second mask.
The Court of Appeal held that those findings were open to the Special Criminal Court. It also upheld the trial court’s rejection of eyewitness descriptions suggesting a significant height difference between the two gunmen, finding that the witnesses had only fleeting and stressful opportunities to observe them.
A further appeal ground concerned mobile phone data. One phone linked to Hunter received a call lasting seven minutes and 42 seconds from a phone associated with the murder group less than an hour after the killing.
The appeal court accepted, in light of later Supreme Court rulings, that the Irish data-retention regime then in force breached EU Charter rights and that criminal communications were not automatically outside privacy protection. However, it concluded that the Special Criminal Court had applied the correct legal test and that the evidence was still admissible because Gardaí had acted reasonably under the law as it stood and any rights breach was not deliberate and conscious.
All substantive grounds of appeal were rejected and Hunter’s murder conviction remains in place.