The High Court has refused an application for an inquiry into the legality of Paul O’Connor’s detention at Midlands Prison, ruling that his detention was in accordance with law.
Mr Justice Hogan delivered the judgment on 5 February 2014. O’Connor, who had applied in writing, argued that a Supreme Court ruling finding a search-warrant provision unconstitutional could affect the evidence used to convict him.
O’Connor was convicted of robbery for participating in the theft of more than €10,000 from a bookmaker’s premises in June 2009. He received a ten-year prison sentence. Evidence obtained under a warrant issued under section 29 of the Offences Against the State Act 1939 was used at his trial in July 2011.
After the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in *Damache v Director of Public Prosecutions*, O’Connor sought to raise the warrant issue in his appeal. The Court of Criminal Appeal refused to allow the new ground because the issue had not been raised at trial. The judgment said O’Connor’s counsel had expressly accepted that the warrant application and its issue were lawful, and that no challenge had been made to the evidence’s admissibility.
The Court of Criminal Appeal later affirmed his conviction and refused leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. Mr Justice Hogan said those decisions bound him. He also relied on the Supreme Court’s recent guidance in *F.X. v Clinical Director of the Central Mental Hospital*: where a court order is not invalid on its face, an appeal is generally the appropriate route, rather than an immediate habeas corpus application.
The High Court judge noted that the 15 July 2011 Circuit Court warrant was valid on its face and that the applicant’s appeal had been considered. He said Article 40.4.2 relief could be available in such circumstances only where there was a jurisdictional error or a clear fundamental denial of constitutional rights. The issue before him, he said, was whether O’Connor could retrospectively rely on *Damache*.
Concluding that O’Connor was being detained in accordance with law and that no further matter required an inquiry, Mr Justice Hogan refused the application. The ruling concerned the request for an Article 40.4.2 inquiry; it did not reopen the conviction or grant further appeal rights.