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Mon 10 Oct 2007Carney side stepped his own logic
Towards the end of his address to the UCC Law Society last week Mr Justice Paul Carney shied away from the logic of his argument. Having implicitly set out a plausible case against victim impact statements, he appeared to shrink from the ineluctable conclusion, writes John Waters.
He had "grave reservations", he said, about following the guidelines advanced by Macken J. in her judgment in the unsuccessful appeal by the DPP against his (Carney J's) sentence in the Holohan murder case, including the proposal that the misuse of a victim impact statement to make "unfounded or scurrilous" allegations against an accused be taken into account by the judge in mitigation of the sentence to be imposed.
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