The Court of Appeal has dismissed Richard Walsh’s appeal against his conviction for assault causing harm, rejecting challenges to the admission of mobile phone footage and to the trial judge’s direction on self-defence.
Walsh was convicted by a jury in the Circuit Criminal Court in Waterford on 18 April 2023 and sentenced in January 2024 to two and a half years in prison, with the final 12 months suspended on conditions. The appeal concerned the conviction, not the sentence.
The case arose from an incident at Kilrush Park, Dungarvan, on 30 November 2020. The complainant, Marie Power, told the trial that Walsh struck her with an iron bar. Walsh’s defence was self-defence. A witness for the defence said he saw Power throw an iron bar at Walsh, who then pushed her to the ground.
A 17-year-old relative of Power recorded a three-to-four-second clip of the incident. The relative sent it to Power’s phone, and Power emailed it to gardaí while an officer watched the transfer. Gardaí did not seize the original phone, and the person who recorded the clip did not give evidence at trial. Walsh argued that the footage’s provenance and integrity had not been sufficiently established and that it might omit relevant material.
The appeal court held that the clip was real evidence, not hearsay. It found the evidence of the transfer and the officer’s viewing of the original recording sufficient to establish authenticity for admission. The court said it would have been better if the phone had been seized and made available for inspection, and if the person who recorded the clip had been interviewed and called as a witness. But those omissions did not make the footage inadmissible in the circumstances. The court found no evidence that the footage presented to the trial court had been manipulated; the possibility that a longer recording had been cropped was, on the evidence, remote. It dismissed this appeal ground.
Walsh also sought to amend his appeal to argue that the trial judge misdirected the jury on self-defence. The Court of Appeal allowed the amendment, then rejected the argument. It said the judge’s reference to “the objective part of the test” could have been better expressed, but the charge, read as a whole, did not impose a wholly objective test. The court found no basis to conclude that the trial was unsatisfactory or the verdict unsafe.
The court dismissed Walsh’s appeal against conviction.