The Court of Appeal has allowed Trevor Gleeson’s appeal against five drug possession convictions, citing errors in the jury’s direction on duress and the prosecution’s failure to disclose CCTV footage before his first trial.
The court held that the trial judge wrongly presented duress as an entirely objective test. It said a jury must consider both objective and subjective elements, including the accused’s particular circumstances. The appeal court did not decide whether Gleeson was acting under duress; that question had been for the jury.
Gleeson, a prison officer at Midlands Prison, was convicted by majority verdict at Naas Circuit Criminal Court on 12 December 2012 of five offences of simple possession under section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, as amended. The jury disagreed on four section 15 counts. He received an 18-month prison sentence, suspended in full for three years.
The case arose after gardaí observed Gleeson’s car in Kildare town on 22 December 2009. They saw Robert Dillon get into the car and later saw a plastic bag thrown from it. The bag contained diamorphine and cannabis with an estimated street value of about €6,000. Gleeson maintained that he had been threatened by criminals to bring drugs into the prison, but intended to discard them. Duress was central to his defence.
The appeal court also considered CCTV from a 29 March 2010 incident at a Eurospar in Kildare town. The footage, which existed at the time of the first trial, was disclosed only during a second trial on the outstanding counts in July 2013. The second-trial judge discharged that jury because of the late disclosure. The appeal court viewed the footage and said it showed two men following Gleeson and his young son into a lift and moving away as a garda approached. The court said the footage could have lent significant credibility to Gleeson’s claim of intimidation and might have influenced the first jury.
The appeal was allowed on both grounds: the duress direction wrongly treated the test as solely objective, and the CCTV should have been made available to the defence at the first trial. The court made no determination on the remaining grounds, including claims that the verdicts were perverse, the investigation was improper, or the Benzylpiperazine offence was unknown to law. The judgment does not state what further proceedings, if any, followed the appeal.