We all know that courts compromise and fudge in order to get a poor conviction rather than to get none at all: better to allow a killer get away on a lesser charge than to get away altogether. We saw that with the murderers of Jerry McCabe; and we see it now acutely with the young female murderer of Rose-Marie Moran, Anita McKeown, who this week is alive and well and living in liberty in South Down even as her lover, Rose-Marie's husband Joseph Moran, begins a sentence of life imprisonment for a murder in which his role was no greater than McKeown's.
Yes, he thoroughly deserves a long sentence for arranging the killing of his wife; but you could also argue that she deserves a very long sentence as well, for the victim was her aunt. Poor Rose-Marie Moran; sexually betrayed both by her niece and her husband, and then killed at their behest. No doubt it is not the first time that a man has had an affair with his wife's niece, but it is still an unusual business; and more unusual still for them then to conspire to bump off the unwanted lady. What interesting reunions they must have in that family.
Hired killers
It is eight years since RoseMarie was savagely murdered, stabbed 37 times in her home by two hired killers who had been driven there by her husband. Her son, who was five at the time of the murder, is now 13, and parentless. He must reach adulthood in the knowledge that of the four people who killed his mother, one, perhaps the prime mover in the entire affair, Anita McKeown, is living freely not far from him, having served four years of an eight-year sentence.
Another of the killers, the one who actually wielded the knife which killed her, remains at large though known to the authorities. The other knifeman, Philip Quigley, was found guilty of manslaughter, and was given eight years. The fourth killer was of course his father; and he is doing life.
One of the men initially sought for murder in this case was Daniel Larkin, of O'Reilly Terrace, Dundalk. Quigley told the court during his trial that Larkin had gone mad during a robbery of Mrs Moran's home, and that he repeatedly stabbed her. Quigley also stabbed her twice.
But we know now that the "robbery-which-went-wrong" is a cover-up story, concocted to conceal the real motive, for a deliberate and savage assassination: to get rid of a young mother who had become inconvenient both to her husband and her niece. We also know that Quigley will be free long before the child he effectively orphaned reaches adulthood.
Second arrest
Daniel Larkin was arrested by gardai in March 1992 and later released without charge. A further arrest was prohibited by the Criminal Justice Act unless authorised by a district judge on foot of new evidence before the gardai. That authorisation was granted and Daniel Larkin was rearrested in August 1992 and was further interrogated.
He was then arrested on an extradition warrant from Northern Ireland. He appealed the validity of this arrest, and five years ago he won the first of his appeals against extradition. The Garda authorities then appealed that ruling, and that appeal was rejected four years ago on the grounds that the new evidence that had been presented to the district justice to justify his arrest a second time "was not in accordance with the requirements of Section 10 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1984."
In essence, the reason for the failure of the extradition case was that the extradition warrant referred both to a substantive charge of murder and to an insubstantive one of conspiracy to murder, but on the foot of the same crime. Counsel for Larkin asserted that to have employed both grounds for extradition was a departure from fair and proper procedure, and that if the Northern authorities hadn't wanted to bring a conspiracy charge, they should not have sought an extradition for it.
We may be in no doubt that in law the two judges who made this ruling, the Chief Justice, Mr Hamilton, and his colleague, Mr Justice Morris, were unquestionably right. But one is left to wonder, not merely about the validity of a law which has prevented a trial because the prosecuting authorities sought to cover their options - a reasonable ambition, surely, when both charges were intimately related to the one heinous crime - but about the morality of a legal culture which can tolerate the huge injustice of neither charges nor evidence ever going before a jury.
But that is not the only occasion on which the victim in her grave and the son growing to adulthood were denied a full trial by the processes of law. When Anita McKeown came before Armagh Crown Court charged with murder four years ago, for a trial which was expected to last three weeks, she unexpectedly pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder. The court accepted that plea, and there was accordingly no trial, merely a sentencing procedure. Thus the court never heard that not merely had McKeown pestered her lover Joe Moran into hiring killers, but she also had paid him £1,000 to do so.
Now free
She received eight years on that charge of conspiracy to murder, served four years and is now free. When Joe Moran came before Mr Justice Nicholson this week on a murder charge, the judge observed that he thought McKeown's sentence was too lenient - an elegant understatement, surely. And he said to Moran: "If I thought you had instigated it, I would have taken a different course."
A young woman has been stabbed to death in her home, and official police statistics will declare that the crime was solved. But it was not solved. Of the two actual killers, one will be free in a couple of years, and the other remains free. The main instigator is free. Only one murderer, the victim's husband, has gone down for life. Serious questions should be asked by the legal profession about the court procedures which could produce such an outcome; but the only sure thing is that they won't be.