The Court of Appeal has rejected Richard Dekker’s challenge to the admission of statements he made during a Garda interview before his 2017 murder conviction, finding that he spoke voluntarily after reading a co-suspect’s account.
The appeal concerned the conviction for the murder of Daniel McAnaspie, whose remains were found in County Meath in 2013. The Court of Appeal judgment, delivered by President Birmingham on 27 July 2022, records that Mr Dekker was convicted after a retrial in 2017. His earlier trial had ended in an acquittal by direction, which the Supreme Court later quashed before ordering a retrial.
The prosecution case was that Trevor Noone stabbed Mr McAnaspie with garden shears and that Mr Dekker was guilty of murder as a party to luring him to a secluded place. In his final interview at Cabra Garda Station in May 2010, Mr Dekker initially denied being at Tolka Valley Park. After Gardaí gave him a memorandum of Mr Noone’s interview to read, he gave a detailed account blaming Mr Noone for the stabbing and describing his own actions and presence at the scene.
Mr Dekker argued on appeal that the trial judge should have excluded the interview statements. He said he had asked to consult his solicitor when Gardaí raised statutory provisions concerning inferences from a failure to mention facts. The Director of Public Prosecutions argued that the statements were voluntary responses after Mr Dekker read the co-suspect’s account, and were not caused by the invocation of those provisions.
The Court of Appeal said Gardaí’s explanation of the inference provisions “left much to be desired” and that Mr Dekker showed confusion about the consequences of silence. But it emphasised that the prosecution had not relied on his silence; it relied on what he said. The Director had accepted that the case could not have supported inferences from silence had Mr Dekker remained silent.
The court held that the change in his account followed his reading of Mr Noone’s statement, which appeared to place the blame on him. It found no indication that Mr Dekker spoke because of confusion or the invocation of the inference provisions, and concluded that his statements were voluntary. The court rejected the appeal grounds concerning their admission. It did not decide the separate question of reasonable access to a solicitor in an interview where adverse inferences were sought, because that question did not arise on the facts before it.