The Court of Criminal Appeal has quashed Bryan Ryan’s murder conviction and ordered a retrial, ruling that the jury was not properly warned about the evidence of a prosecution witness in the Witness Protection Programme.
Ryan had been convicted by a 10–2 jury majority in December 2008 of murdering Ian Tobin. The appeal court, in a judgment delivered by Chief Justice Murray on 11 March 2011, granted leave to appeal and allowed the appeal on the jury-warning ground.
The prosecution case was that Ryan drove Michael Murray to a house in Blanchardstown in May 2007 so Murray could kill Blake Tobin. Ian Tobin was shot through a window and died from his injuries. The prosecution said Blake was the intended target. Ryan’s trial conviction was based on joint enterprise; the case was not that he fired the gun.
A central prosecution witness, Kevin Whelan, was under witness protection. The trial judge gave the jury a conditional warning about the danger of relying on an accomplice’s uncorroborated evidence, and told them to consider Whelan’s protection status and benefits. But the warning applied only if jurors were not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Whelan was not an accomplice.
The appeal court said that was insufficient. Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in DPP v Gilligan, it held that a protected witness’s evidence is a category of potentially unreliable evidence in its own right, whether or not the witness is an accomplice. The jury should have been warned that it was dangerous to convict on such evidence without corroboration, while also being told it could still rely on the evidence if satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of its credibility.
The court concluded that the missing warning fundamentally affected how the jury considered the evidence, making the verdict unsafe. It therefore quashed the verdict and ordered a retrial.
The court rejected Ryan’s other appeal grounds. It upheld the trial judge’s decision to admit part of one police interview after a brief telephone consultation with his solicitor, finding that the consultation cured the earlier denial of access in the circumstances. It also found no proven causal link between statements made during unlawful detention and the later admitted statements, and upheld the trial judge’s findings that the admitted interview was voluntary and fair.
The court also rejected the challenge to limits on disclosure of the witness-protection arrangements, finding the defence had an opportunity to question Whelan about benefits. Finally, it dismissed the claim that the jury should have been offered manslaughter as an alternative verdict, finding no legal or evidential basis for that direction on the joint-enterprise case presented.