The High Court has prohibited the further trial of Philomena Coton on charges linked to a 1988 attack on her husband, concluding that years of inactivity by gardaí outweighed her delay in seeking to stop the prosecution.
In a judgment delivered on 12 June 2015, President of the High Court Kearns said the court reached its decision “not without some misgivings”. It barred the further trial; the judgment did not determine whether Coton committed the offences.
Coton was charged in January 2013 with unlawfully and maliciously causing grievous bodily harm to Christopher Payne, her husband, with intent to murder him, and with a second grievous-bodily-harm charge. The prosecution alleged that she and her daughter arranged for four men to attack Payne at the family home in Crumlin in May 1988. Payne, who had severe renal disease, died six months later. Coton denied responsibility in the judicial review proceedings.
The judgment said a decision to charge Coton had been made in July 1989, but she was not told. She moved to England that month. The court found she had lived openly there, leaving records through housing, benefits and employment. Gardaí believed she had moved abroad, but the judge found no real effort to locate her for many years. The prosecution accepted that there had been blameworthy delay.
The State argued that the charges were serious, that Coton had made admissions, and that any prejudice from missing or unavailable witnesses could be addressed at trial. It also argued that her application was late. The court had previously extended the time to bring it, but Kearns said that extension did not remove applicant delay from the overall assessment. He described the ten-month interval between Coton’s return for trial and her application as significant.
The judge considered the delay against the public interest in prosecuting serious crime and the effects on Coton. He said the alleged admissions were not clear enough to carry substantial weight in the balance. The judgment also noted that the Supreme Court had already prohibited the trial of Coton’s daughter, Sharon Cullen, in separate proceedings, while stressing that Coton’s case had to be assessed on its own facts.
Kearns concluded that the gardaí had waited for information about Coton’s whereabouts to emerge by chance, despite her living and working openly in Britain. In those circumstances, and given the decision in Cullen’s case, the court ordered that Coton’s trial could not proceed.