The Court of Appeal has dismissed Criostóir MacCarthaigh’s appeal against his conviction for murdering David White, rejecting all 10 grounds of appeal.
MacCarthaigh was convicted after a 10-day Central Criminal Court trial and sentenced to life imprisonment on 19 December 2013. The Court of Appeal judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Sheehan on 3 November 2015, upheld the trial judge’s rulings on evidence and jury directions.
The court found that answers MacCarthaigh gave during Garda interviews amounted to failures or refusals to account for DNA found on White’s jeans and for his presence at Mill Lane in Palmerstown around the time of the killing. It said the answers were given voluntarily after consultation with a solicitor, and that the judge was entitled to leave the question of inferences to the jury. The appeal court also found the jury had been properly directed on the limits of any inferences.
The judgment records the prosecution case that White was stabbed after encountering MacCarthaigh while walking home from a pub in Phibsboro, then taken in a van to a wasteland area at Mill Lane, where he was stabbed repeatedly. MacCarthaigh’s defence at trial was that Simon Griffin had killed White and fabricated an account implicating him. Griffin was a central prosecution witness and had pleaded guilty to an offence relating to the removal of White’s body.
The appeal court also upheld the admission of evidence from Ivan Ennis, who said an earlier encounter had led him to believe MacCarthaigh had a knife and had threatened him. The court said the evidence was relevant to whether MacCarthaigh had a knife on the night of the killing, leaving its credibility to the jury.
It found that the defence questioning of Griffin about his previous convictions went beyond permissible questioning and was designed to blacken his character. The court held that this caused MacCarthaigh to lose the statutory protection against evidence of his own character. It was therefore permissible for the prosecution to introduce his previous conviction for an explosives offence. The jury had also been told that the conviction could not support an inference of guilt and was relevant, if at all, to credibility.
The court further upheld the trial judge’s refusal to discharge the jury after Gary Walsh gave evidence of a conversation in which he said MacCarthaigh referred to “what we did” and warned him to keep quiet. The appeal court noted that the defence had not explained at trial how it was prejudiced or sought a short adjournment to take further instructions.
Finally, it ruled that forensic samples taken after MacCarthaigh was arrested under section 42 of the Criminal Justice Act 1999 were admissible. The court concluded that such an arrested person was dealt with as though detained under section 4 of the 1984 Act, including for the purpose of providing forensic samples. The appeal against conviction was dismissed.