The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Catherine Nevin’s application to quash her convictions for murdering her husband, Thomas Nevin, and soliciting three men to murder him. The application, brought under section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993, argued that newly discovered material about prosecution witnesses had not been disclosed and could have affected the trial.
The court, in a judgment delivered by Mr Justice Hardiman on 22 November 2010, said an applicant under section 2 need not prove that a miscarriage of justice had actually occurred. The question was whether newly discovered material, assessed objectively and in the context of the case, might have raised a reasonable doubt or shown the conviction to be unsafe. A disclosure failure had to have significant consequences, rather than be technical or trivial.
Nevin was convicted in the Central Criminal Court on 11 April 2000. The prosecution case was that she procured another person to kill her husband; it did not allege that she fired the fatal shot. The murder case was circumstantial and depended in part on evidence from John Jones, Gerard Heapes and William McClean, each of whom testified that Nevin had asked him to arrange or carry out the killing. Nevin denied those accounts at trial, and the jury’s verdicts showed it accepted the men’s evidence.
In her application, Nevin alleged that the men had links to State informers and paramilitary activity, and relied particularly on a Garda “Suspect Antecedent History Form” concerning McClean. Her counsel also pointed to material gathered in a later inquiry into the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, which was said to offer leads about whether McClean had stayed at the Four Courts Hotel before the bombings. The application further raised an account that a man known as C. had sought an alibi for the night of the murder.
The court examined the form and more than 140 similar forms from the investigation. It concluded that the forms were informal records, not limited to suspects, and that McClean’s form did not establish that he was an informer, a member of an unlawful organisation or connected to the murder. The court said the material about the hotel was too remote in time and relevance to qualify as significant newly discovered fact. It also found the alleged alibi account did not undermine the prosecution case, which was that Nevin had procured the killing rather than carried it out herself.
The court said it found no support in the documents it examined for the allegation that the three witnesses were paid State informers. It agreed with the earlier decision that the requested Garda material was not relevant for disclosure. The application was dismissed; the court did not quash the convictions or order a retrial.