The High Court has refused to prevent the prosecution of Mark Nash on charges arising from the Grangegorman double murders, ruling that the long delay and other alleged sources of prejudice did not make a fair trial impossible.
Nash sought an injunction restraining the Director of Public Prosecutions from proceeding with murder charges concerning Sylvia Sheils and Mary Callinan, who were killed at Orchard View, Grangegorman, Dublin 7, in March 1997.
He argued that the prosecution should be stopped because of delay, prejudicial publicity, the deaths or unavailability of potentially important witnesses, the handling and storage of forensic exhibits and the refusal of applications to transfer him to a UK prison.
The prosecution intended to rely substantially on two categories of evidence. The first comprised admissions which Gardaí alleged Nash made in 1997 while being investigated for the separate Roscommon murders, admissions which he later retracted. The second was DNA evidence obtained years later from his jacket. Testing in 2009 produced profiles said to match both Grangegorman victims, with the estimated chance of an unrelated person sharing each profile stated as less than one in one billion.
The investigation had been complicated by separate admissions made by Dean Lyons, who was initially charged with one of the murders before proceedings against him were discontinued in 1998. Lyons later denied involvement and died in 2000.
Mr Justice Moriarty accepted that the investigation had involved substantial delay and that witnesses including Lyons and former State Pathologist Professor James Harbison were unavailable. However, he found those matters did not create an unavoidable unfairness which a trial judge could not address through evidential rulings and directions.
The judge reached the same conclusion on extensive and sometimes lurid media coverage, finding that careful jury selection and judicial directions could protect the trial process.
The application was therefore refused. The judgment made no finding on Nash’s guilt or innocence of the Grangegorman charges.