The Court of Appeal dismissed John Conroy’s appeal against his convictions for endangerment, unlawful seizure of a vehicle and 13 counts of dangerous driving, but reduced his sentence after finding the offences arose from one transaction.
The court quashed the three-and-a-half-year sentence for unlawful seizure and imposed a two-and-a-half-year term to run concurrently with the sentence for reckless endangerment. It held that making the unlawful seizure term consecutive had resulted in a disproportionate or excessive overall sentence.
The original sentence totalled eight years before reduction to six and a half years, with the final year suspended for five years. Conroy was also disqualified from driving for ten years. The appeal judgment does not state that the Court of Appeal changed that disqualification.
The convictions followed a trial at Galway Circuit Criminal Court. On 31 May 2016, Gardaí saw a black Volkswagen Golf travelling on the wrong side of the road near Salthill and Knocknacarra in Galway. The car was pursued at high speed around the city, with the pursuit called off because of the danger. The driver later crashed. The judgment said the car had at one stage been driven at more than 160 kilometres per hour.
The prosecution relied chiefly on statements by the car’s owner, Thomas Ackroyd. He said two men entered his car in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and forced him to drive; he identified one as John Conroy, though his first statement qualified the surname as possibly Sweeney. Ackroyd later said one man forced him into the back seat and Conroy took over driving. The statements were admitted at trial under section 16 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006 after Ackroyd said he did not remember their contents.
Conroy argued that the statements should not have been admitted, that there was insufficient identification evidence for the case to go to the jury, and that the jury should have been directed to the absence of DNA evidence linking him to a blue T-shirt or the driver’s area of the car. The Court of Appeal rejected those grounds. It found the trial judge had acted within his discretion in admitting the statements and that the identification evidence was sufficient for the jury to consider. The court said it was for the defence to address the jury about the absence of DNA or fingerprint evidence; the judge was not required to do so.
On sentence, the appeal court found no error in principle in the trial judge’s consideration of mitigation. It accepted, however, that the offences on the evening in question amounted to one transaction and that consecutive sentences were erroneous in this case. The court replaced the unlawful seizure sentence with a concurrent term.