The Court of Criminal Appeal has found that Martin Conmey’s 1972 manslaughter conviction amounted to a miscarriage of justice, after concluding that undisclosed witness statements left no untouched body of evidence capable of establishing the joint enterprise the prosecution said was essential to convict him.
The ruling came on an application under section 9 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993. The court had quashed Conmey’s conviction in 2010. In this later proceeding, it considered whether newly discovered facts showed that the conviction was a miscarriage of justice. It did not determine whether Conmey or anyone else was guilty or innocent.
The judgment concerned initial Garda statements from witnesses Martin Madden, Seán Reilly and John Shevlin. The court said those statements, which were not disclosed to the defence at trial, tended to favour the defence and conflicted with later accounts. The first statements were made within days of later, materially different statements. The court said no explanation for withholding them had been given.
The witnesses’ evidence about a car on Porterstown Lane was central to the prosecution case. The trial judge had described Madden’s evidence as “crucial” and told the jury that much of the prosecution case depended on establishing that Dick Donnelly’s car met Una Lynskey and that she was taken into it.
The court said it was impossible, more than four decades later, to reach a definite conclusion about guilt or innocence. It also noted that Reilly, the surviving witness among the three, alleged that Gardaí pressured him, including by physical assault, to change his statement. That was the only explanation before the court for the changed evidence; the judgment did not find that the alleged pressure occurred.
The prosecution accepted that Conmey could only have been convicted on the basis of a joint enterprise involving Donnelly, Conmey and the late Martin Kerrigan. The court said the newly discovered material left only one item of prosecution evidence wholly untouched: a former flatmate’s account that Conmey had said, “They killed her with the car.” The court identified ambiguities in that statement and noted that medical evidence excluded death caused by being struck by a car.
The court concluded that the prosecution had not identified an untouched body of incriminating evidence capable of establishing a joint enterprise. It therefore found that the 1972 conviction, reached after the three original statements were withheld by a person connected with the prosecution whose identity was unknown, amounted to a miscarriage of justice.