The Court of Criminal Appeal has rejected David Timmons’s application for leave to appeal his conviction for conspiracy to possess cocaine for sale or supply.
Timmons was convicted at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 12 December 2008 and sentenced to eight years. The alleged offence was said to have occurred on 14 September 2006. The Court of Criminal Appeal delivered its judgment on 12 April 2011. It considered the grounds raised by the applicant but refused leave to appeal.
The court rejected challenges to the admission of text messages found on two mobile phones and entries in a notebook recovered from a bedroom in the house where Timmons lived with his girlfriend and their baby. Timmons had acknowledged owning the phones. The court said the trial judge was entitled to find the material relevant and to conclude that its probative value outweighed its prejudicial effect. It also held there was evidence connecting the notebook to Timmons’s control. The court stressed that the weight of the evidence was for the jury.
The applicant argued there was insufficient evidence of a conspiracy, including no evidence that he, BT and JG had agreed to possess cocaine. The court said there was evidence a jury could consider, including Timmons’s movements and car journeys, communications with each co-accused, and the circumstances in which the co-accused were found at the drugs transfer. It held the trial judge properly left the case to the jury. The court also rejected the argument that the jury needed directions based on English drug classifications, which do not apply in the same way in Ireland.
Other grounds concerned police references to surveillance, jurors’ reported unease about people near the courtroom, the wording of the indictment, and the judge’s directions, including a warning against seeking information outside the trial. The court found no basis to grant leave on those grounds. It said the jury had received an appropriate direction to decide the case on trial evidence, and there was no evidence of internet searches or jury contamination. It also held that the single conspiracy count was not duplicitous and that the surveillance evidence described officers’ direct observations during the events.
The court’s decision concerned whether leave to appeal should be granted. It rejected the application; the judgment did not determine a full appeal on the merits.