ANALYSIS:Most of the debate in court will focus on the admissibility of notes of interviews with Colm Murphy by gardaí, writes CAROL COULTER
COUNSEL FOR Colm Murphy, Michael O’Higgins, warned the Special Criminal Court yesterday at the outset of the retrial of his client for conspiracy in connection with the Omagh bombing that he would be raising a number of issues concerning the evidence. This will prolong the trial, which is expected to take up to six weeks.
These issues will be raised in a procedure known as a voir dire, more colloquially as a trial-within-a-trial, where lawyers argue for and against the exclusion of certain evidence from consideration by the jury. In a normal criminal trial this takes place in the absence of the jury.
The Special Criminal Court is a non-jury three-judge court, where the judges act simultaneously as judge and jury. In the voir dire, they are asked to mentally exclude certain evidence from their deliberations.
O’Higgins said he would firstly raise the relevance of details of the Omagh bombing. He stressed his client was not being charged with this crime, but with conspiracy. “The offence is completed once the plans are made,” he said, irrespective of whether any bombing actually took place at all. “So what happened in Omagh has no relevance.”
He also said he would make submissions relating to the use of Murphy’s phone in the Banbridge area at about the time this town was bombed on August 1st, 1998, less than two weeks before the Omagh bombing. He said he would challenge the assumption that he should have known that it would be used in the Omagh bombing 10 days later.
However, most of the legal debate is likely to surround the admissibility of notes of interviews with Murphy by teams of gardaí in Monaghan Garda station over three days following his arrest in February 1999. It was controversy over these notes that led to the Court of Criminal Appeal quashing Murphy’s original conviction in 2002 and the retrial.
During the original trial it was found that interview notes taken by one of the interrogation teams had been altered, but the court found this did not cast serious doubt on the notes of the other gardaí, in which they claimed Murphy made admissions of his knowledge of the use to which the phone would be put.
Prosecuting counsel Tom O’Connell drew the court’s attention to the Court of Criminal Appeal’s ruling during yesterday’s hearing.
That court found the alteration to the notes of one of the interviews raised an issue as to the extent to which other officers might or might not have been involved to some degree in collusion, at least to the extent of correcting the initial error and facilitating the filing of an amended third page in the notes.If this was a jury trial, “a very strong warning would have had to be given”, the court said.
All this will now be revisited, for a third time, in the course of this trial, and its outcome could well depend on whether or not the interview notes are admitted.