The Court of Appeal has quashed John O’Donoghue’s convictions for assault causing serious harm and violent disorder after finding that the failure to secure potentially relevant CCTV deprived him of a realistic prospect of a defence.
The court’s judgment, delivered on 16 February 2024, upheld a ground of appeal concerning CCTV from a house across the road from the scene in Rathkeale, Co Limerick. It concluded that the trial judge’s refusal to withdraw the case from the jury did not engage with the significance of the evidence about those cameras.
The incident occurred on 16 December 2017 at Kealy’s Yard. The injured party, William O’Driscoll Senior, said O’Donoghue attacked him with a machete while others threw missiles at the family’s caravan and a nearby vehicle. O’Donoghue denied assaulting him and said O’Driscoll had attacked first. These were competing accounts considered at trial.
Kathleen Keeley, whose house was across the road, testified for the defence that her CCTV cameras were operating at the time, that Gardaí asked about footage and that she gave them permission to access it. A forensic engineer testified that one camera’s line of sight covered the area where O’Donoghue said the incident happened. The prosecution’s evidence was that it had been informed that CCTV enquiries produced nothing of evidential value. The judgment records that no notes were kept of the door-to-door enquiries or the people spoken to.
The appeal court said the opposing accounts made CCTV potentially vital. It found the failure to pursue the footage a significant omission and said the evidence supported a realistic prospect of a defence. The trial judge had relied in part on uncertainty about whether the camera was recording and whether the incident would have been visible. The appeal court considered those issues could have been investigated and rejected the reasoning given for refusing the application.
The court also considered other grounds. It criticised the way Garda Joe Collins’s notebook entry about vehicle damage was disclosed and used at trial, but found it added little to photographs already before the jury and did not make the trial unfair. It rejected the arguments that the verdicts were inconsistent, that the jury directions were inadequate, and that a juror’s later email undermined the recorded unanimous verdict.
At trial, O’Donoghue had been convicted on 9 November 2021 and sentenced to concurrent terms of 10 years for assault causing serious harm and eight years for violent disorder. He had been acquitted of producing an article capable of inflicting serious injury and of threatening to kill. The appeal court quashed the convictions on Counts 1 and 5. It said it would hear further from the parties about the consequences of its order; the judgment does not specify those consequences.