The Supreme Court has quashed Circuit Criminal Court orders which allowed two separate indictments against James Alan Conlon to be combined for trial.
Mr Conlon had faced three fraudulent-conversion charges arising in April 1996. He was sent forward for trial later that year and was tried on those charges in February 1998, but the jury disagreed and he was remanded for a retrial.
Separately, he was charged in August 1997 with eight similar fraudulent-conversion offences involving different alleged victims and was returned for trial on those charges in March 1998.
When both matters came before Judge Cyril Kelly in July 1998, the Director of Public Prosecutions applied to put both sets of charges into one consolidated indictment. The judge permitted that course and made a further consolidation order in November.
Mr Conlon challenged those decisions by judicial review. The High Court refused his application, holding that the relevant criminal legislation allowed the charges to be joined and that any resulting prejudice could be addressed through statutory protections.
The Supreme Court disagreed. Mr Justice Fennelly held that section 5 of the Criminal Justice (Administration) Act 1924 and the accompanying rules allow prosecutors to join related charges when initially framing an indictment. They do not give a court power to combine two already existing indictments based on separate returns for trial.
The court also considered the statutory power to amend a defective indictment. It held that this did not extend to merging separate indictments in the circumstances before it.
Nor could the general civil procedural rule allowing consolidation of court cases be used to create such a criminal jurisdiction. The court held that the rule was not intended to apply in that way to criminal proceedings.
Because Judge Kelly lacked jurisdiction to make the consolidation orders, the Supreme Court said those orders were void. It therefore did not need to decide Mr Conlon’s separate argument that combining the charges was unfair.