Mark Nash appeal challenges admissions and DNA evidence

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Mark Nash’s appeal against his convictions for murdering Sylvia Sheils (59) and Mary Callanan (61) was being heard by the Court of Appeal. The proceedings were reported on 7 November 2017.

He had pleaded not guilty to both murders at the Central Criminal Court. The charges concerned killings between 6 March and 7 March 1997. The women’s bodies were found in sheltered accommodation in Grangegorman.

A jury unanimously convicted Nash in 2015 after a 48-day trial and four hours’ deliberation. Mr Justice Carroll Moran imposed the mandatory life sentence on 20 April 2015.

Nash was already serving life since October 1998 for murdering two people in Ballintober, Castlerea, Roscommon, in mid-August 1997. A woman was also seriously injured.

Opening the appeal on 6 November 2017, defence counsel Hugh Hartnett SC said the case was unusual because another man, the late Dean Lyons, had confessed. He identified Nash’s admissions and DNA evidence as the prosecution case’s two main planks.

The report said initial testing of Nash’s jacket found nothing of probative value. Nearly ten years later, advances in science enabled DNA to be found around its button threads.

Hartnett said State laboratory scientists accepted a low risk of contamination. He said other profiles had been established, laboratory precautions in 1997 were less acute, and cross-examination revealed that the victims’ bed clothing had been brushed down in the same room where the jacket was examined six weeks later.

DPP counsel Brendan Grehan SC argued that contamination required a “mind boggling series of coincidences” and called the case “coercive, compelling”. He said the mixed profile could not be identified and it was wrong and misleading to describe it as other people’s DNA. He acknowledged that missing witnesses posed a prosecution problem: Lyons, who died in 2000, could not explain his confession.

Further submissions were due on 8 November 2017 before Mr Justice Alan Mahon, Mr Justice John Edwards and Mr Justice Michael White.