Defence asks jury to put morality to one side as prosecution focuses on the unequal fight and the judge dwells on lies, writes KATHY SHERIDANat the Central Criminal Court
EVEN THE comparatively prosaic business of closing addresses failed to deter the usual crowd lined up 90 minutes before the start, poised to storm the door of Court 19, armed with nothing but grim determination and – in some cases – their sandwiches.
After lunch a Courts Service official took a firm hand and dispatched 30 of them to the overflow room.
By then, prosecution and defence counsels had wrapped up their closing speeches to the jury. Brendan Grehan’s 42-minute address finished up neatly at 12.58. It began with a request to acquit – “I would say that, wouldn’t I? Mr Lillis is my client” – which raised faint smiles among the six men and six women, before he moved on to deal with the claims around the origin of the wounds that led to Ms Cawley’s death and then to the significance of his client’s affair with Jean Treacy.
Even in the strongest marriage, one could see how “a beautiful young woman has the capacity to cause you to roll back the years in terms of where your life is at”. What man wouldn’t be flattered to have his hand placed on a pulse that he had caused to race?
He wasn’t suggesting that it was “other than a fling, or that Eamonn Lillis was going to ride off into the sunset with Jean Treacy but that he responded differently that morning as a result of what was going on with Ms Treacy”.
“This is a court of law, not a court of morality,” he said as Eamonn Lillis clasped and unclasped his hands, eyes downcast as usual.
“We are not asking you to judge Mr Lillis’s righteousness, or moral fibre, or sins, or transgressions”.
Earlier, prosecution counsel Mary Ellen Ring, while comparing “the two protagonists” involved in the row that morning, faced delicately into the weight and fitness disparity between them.
“Celine Cawley was found to be obese, not to put too fine a point on it ... It’s upsetting to talk about someone’s weight,” she added, but here was a “fit man who looked after himself and a woman who wasn’t as fit ... the woman who Eamonn Lillis said fell down and bounced up like a beach ball, who slipped and got up, the woman that he wrestled with ... It’s not surprising who would come out of it with wounds on their fingers, and who would come out with head injuries.”
She wasn’t suggesting that he had a long-term plan to kill his wife but that an opportunity presented itself that morning and that Mr Lillis had taken it.
Mr Justice Barry White began his charge after lunch, drawing repeated attention to Mr Lillis’s propensity to lie, and included a scathing criticism of a 20-minute Garda video of the Lillis-Cawley home shown to the court. “I thought it was in very bad taste and unnecessary,” he said before moving on to the notes found on Mr Lillis’s dressing table – described by Lillis as an outline for a film – of which the final line read : “You are running out of time!!!”.
How the jury construed that was up to them, he said; did they believe Mr Lillis’s explanation or did the notes have a “more sinister” meaning? By 4pm, he told the jury they could go home. He had hoped to be further along and reckoned he would need another hour this morning. They could discuss the case among themselves, he warned – “but remember: I haven’t finished”.