The Court of Appeal has quashed a conviction after finding that material edited out of the appellant’s Garda interview was of considerable significance and went to the core of his defence. The court allowed the appeal on one ground, concerning the exclusion of interview material, and said an order for a retrial had already been made.
The appellant had pleaded not guilty to four counts of assault contrary to section 2 of the Non-Fatal Offences against the Person Act 1997, one count of assault contrary to section 3 of that Act, and one count of producing an article capable of inflicting serious injury, contrary to section 11 of the Firearms and Offensive Weapons Act 1990.
He was sentenced in July 2019 to four months’ imprisonment on the four section 2 counts and two years’ imprisonment, with the final year suspended, on the section 3 assault and section 11 offence. The sentences were concurrent and backdated for time already spent in custody. The judgment says a separate appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions against sentence as unduly lenient had been decided before this conviction appeal. The Court of Appeal stressed that the present judgment dealt only with the conviction appeal and one ground.
That ground challenged the trial judge’s decision to allow parts of the first and second Garda interview memoranda to be edited. The defence position recorded in the judgment was that the injured party had caused her own injuries and had wrongly blamed the appellant, and that she had done so before. These were claims attributed to the appellant’s interview account, not findings by the appeal court.
The prosecution had argued that material about the parties’ prior relationship should be excluded because the defence had asked that the complainant not give evidence about that history. The Court of Appeal noted an inconsistency: the defence had objected to relationship evidence and sought discharge of the jury, but also opposed editing the interviews. It further said the interview account had not been put to the complainant, as it should have been.
Applying the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in DPP v Almasi, the Court of Appeal said it did not need to decide whether interview editing was barred in every case. On the facts before it, the excluded material should not have been edited because it went in a core way to the defence. The court said it would have been possible, exceptionally, to recall the complainant so the issues could be put to her, while describing those issues as distasteful and perhaps lacking in credibility.
The court found an error in law, quashed the conviction and allowed the appeal. It recorded that an order for a retrial had already been made by the date the judgment was approved.