The Court of Criminal Appeal has quashed Martin Conmey’s 1972 manslaughter conviction, ruling that previously undisclosed witness statements showed there might have been a miscarriage of justice.
The court delivered its judgment on 22 November 2010 in an application under section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993. It said that provision allowed relief where new or newly discovered material might have raised a reasonable doubt at trial; an applicant did not have to prove that a miscarriage of justice had actually occurred.
Conmey and co-accused Dick Donnelly were convicted on 14 July 1972 of the manslaughter of Una Lynskey, who disappeared in October 1971. Donnelly’s conviction was later set aside on appeal, but Conmey’s was affirmed. The prosecution case against Conmey was circumstantial, and the court said there was no direct or forensic evidence linking him to the crime. A central issue at trial was whether he had been in Donnelly’s car on Porterstown Lane around the time Lynskey disappeared.
The application focused on earlier statements by witnesses Séan Reilly, Martin Madden and John Shevlin. Their initial accounts did not place Donnelly’s car on the lane during the crucial period, while later accounts differed and were used to support the prosecution case. The court found that the original statements were in the State’s possession, were materially inconsistent with later accounts and should have been disclosed to the defence. It concluded that they had not been disclosed.
Reilly told the court in 2010 that gardaí had pressured and assaulted him to make a statement implicating the accused. The judgment said it was not then deciding whether those allegations were true. It noted that Reilly’s account offered a defence-favourable explanation for the change in his statements, and that no other explanation had been presented to the court.
The State argued that the statements were not significant enough to affect the conviction, that the defence should have sought them, and that the application came too late. The court rejected those arguments. It noted that the statements had been difficult to obtain and that the changed accounts had contributed to Conmey’s questioning and lengthy retention at Trim Garda Station. The judgment described the effect of the non-disclosure on a trial held more than 30 years earlier as impossible to establish with certainty, but said the material showed there might have been a miscarriage of justice.
The court therefore quashed Conmey’s conviction. The judgment does not order a retrial or make a finding that he was innocent.