The Court of Appeal has quashed Jean Louis Fancony’s convictions for causing serious harm and producing a bread knife during a dispute, ruling that remarks attributed to him at the time of his arrest should have been excluded. The court has not decided whether there will be a retrial and said it would hear the parties on that question.
Fancony was convicted after a trial at Limerick Circuit Criminal Court on 30 November 2020 and sentenced on 3 February 2021 to seven and a half years in prison, backdated to 22 July 2019. The charges arose from an incident at his apartment at Bishop’s Quay, Limerick, where he stabbed his housemate, Tim Crowley. Fancony accepted that he had stabbed Crowley but said Crowley was the aggressor and that he acted in self-defence.
At trial, Garda Enda Clifford said Fancony made remarks after he was stopped on Dock Road, including, “I knifed the Irish guy because he was a Satanist”. Fancony denied saying this and gave a different account of his words. The remarks were recorded by the garda but were not read back to Fancony or offered for him to sign. He was not interviewed about the incident after being taken to hospital for an involuntary psychiatric assessment.
The appeal challenged the admission of the remarks and raised concerns about missing evidence and the Garda investigation. It also sought to introduce evidence that Clifford had been convicted of road traffic offences in 2012. The Court of Appeal found the complaints about missing items and CCTV, and the absence of a statement from a neighbouring apartment occupant, had no merit. It refused to admit the proposed evidence about Clifford’s convictions, finding it would not have been material to the jury’s verdict.
The court said Gardaí acted properly in responding to concerns about Fancony’s welfare and arranging medical assessment. It also concluded there was no breach of the Judges’ Rules in failing to read back and obtain a signature for the roadside remarks; even if there had been a breach, the trial judge could have admitted them in the exercise of discretion.
However, the appeal court said evidence from a priest with medical and psychiatric qualifications, a doctor, hospital authorities and a consultant psychiatrist suggested Fancony was suffering from psychosis when speaking to Clifford. In those circumstances, it concluded the remarks should have been excluded because of concerns about the overall fairness of admitting them. The convictions were quashed, with the question of a retrial reserved for a further hearing.