The High Court has refused an application by Dean Spellman to prohibit his prosecution over an alleged burglary at D.I.D. Electrical in Galway, ruling that the loss of CCTV footage did not establish a real risk of an unfair trial.
The footage, recorded on 16 December 2009, was overwritten after a camera programming error meant it was retained for 15 days rather than the 30 days Gardaí had been told to expect. The court found that Gardaí had tried to obtain and preserve it and that there was nothing suspicious about how it became unavailable. It said the circumstances of the loss were relevant to the case’s background but did not determine the application.
Spellman argued that the footage might have identified a third person among the three alleged burglars, excluding him, or shown all three at the premises at times when Gardaí said he was at his girlfriend’s apartment. His solicitor also relied on the fact that blood found at the scene did not match Spellman or two other men charged in connection with the events.
The prosecution opposed the application. Its evidence, as summarised by the judge, included surveillance observations of Spellman with Patrick Flaherty and Jonathan King before the burglary, and later movements between the apartment and the Briarhill Business Park. The prosecution also relied on a text message and on a consaw and black holdall recovered near a gate by the business park. A forensic statement said Spellman could not be excluded as a contributor to a minor mixed DNA profile on a bar found at the scene, but the judge accepted that this did not prove he had handled it or positively connect him to the burglary.
The judge said the CCTV viewers had not identified the three people shown. She found it speculative to suggest that preserved footage would have identified a third person, and fanciful to suggest it might have shown all three alleged burglars together at the times Spellman said he was elsewhere. The evidence described by the store manager indicated that, after three men entered, little could be seen inside; the cameras were not night-enabled, and the manager could not say whether all three remained together.
Applying the legal test for stopping a prosecution because evidence is missing, the court held that Spellman had not shown that the footage was likely to bear on his guilt or innocence in a way that created an unavoidable risk of an unfair trial. The judge said procedural safeguards available at trial could address any prejudice from the missing footage.
The court refused the application. The decision concerned whether the prosecution could proceed; it did not decide whether Spellman was guilty.