The High Court has restrained the Director of Public Prosecutions from taking any further steps in summary-charge proceedings against Florence Healy, after finding that the delay created a real and substantial risk of injustice if the charges were dealt with summarily.
Mr Justice Brian McGovern delivered the judgment on 13 March 2007. Healy had been charged with assault, breach of the peace, failing to comply with a Garda direction, and resisting or wilfully obstructing a peace officer. The charges arose from events on 18 May 2003.
The application was heard alongside a separate judicial review application by Vincent Dodd, which the judgment said arose from the same circumstances. Healy was with Dodd, but unlike him she did not face road traffic offences.
The judge said Healy’s charges would have to be determined on oral evidence, and any conflict could only be resolved by assessing witnesses’ recollections of events that had occurred almost four years earlier. For reasons set out in the Dodd judgment, and relying on legal authorities cited there, he concluded that too much time had elapsed to allow summary disposal without a real and substantial risk of injustice.
The judge said not all of the delay could be attributed to the DPP. However, he identified a substantial period of delay arising from the respondent’s failure to clarify within a reasonable time that Garda members no longer held statements relating to Dodd’s complaint to the Garda Complaints Board.
Healy had been given leave to seek judicial review on 3 July 2006. The court granted the relief she sought and restrained further steps in the proceedings brought in the name of the DPP at the suit of Garda Gerard P. Sweeney. The order concerned the four summary charges identified in the judgment. It did not determine their underlying facts or record findings on whether Healy committed them.