Aaron Brady lodges appeal against garda murder conviction

Aaron Brady, who was last week sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe, has lodged an appeal against his conviction.

The Courts Service confirmed on Friday that Brady lodged the appeal on Thursday. The 29-year-old had 28 days following sentence in which to submit his appeal. It is understood that no grounds for the appeal have yet been submitted.

Brady, with a last address at New Road, Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, was convicted in August of the murder of a garda acting in accordance with his duty for shooting Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe dead during a robbery at Lordship Credit Union in Co Louth on January 25th, 2013.

Last Wednesday, Mr Justice Michael White sentenced Brady to life imprisonment for the capital murder offence. The Criminal Justice Act 1990 states that the minimum time Brady will serve in prison for capital murder is 40 years.

Mr Justice White also sentenced Brady to 14 years for the robbery, a sentence that will run concurrently with the life sentence. The raiders stole €7,000 during the robbery, which lasted 58 seconds.

During several weeks of legal argument Brady’s defence objected to vast swathes of evidence that ended up going before the jury.

They also wanted to put evidence before the jury that they said pointed to a campaign to induce witnesses in the United States to give evidence against Brady under the threat that they would be deported if they did not.

They were not permitted to do so as the trial judge Mr Justice Michael White said it was a collateral issue.

Those issues are likely to form some of the grounds for the appeal as Brady’s lawyers will argue that the trial judge should not have ruled against them.

Among the issues likely to be contained in the appeal was the evidence of Molly Staunton. Ms Staunton was initially expected to travel from her New York home to Dublin to give evidence but that plan was scrapped when Covid-19 swept through New York.

The extent of the lockdown there was such that plans to have her give evidence via videolink from a government building also had to be scrapped.

In the end, she gave her evidence from her apartment despite complaints by Brady’s defence that the scenario took away from the proper gravitas of a criminal trial.

When Ms Staunton finally gave evidence she was twice interrupted by a man in her apartment who told her, among other things, “no more testimony” and “tell them what you are supposed to tell them”.

In one dramatic incident, Ms Staunton was interrupted at a critical point in her evidence and could be heard arguing with the man before her laptop suddenly shut down.

The key part of her evidence was that she heard Brady admit that he “shot a cop” while he lived in Ireland.

Brady’s lawyers argued that the jury would see the interruption as prejudicial against their client and even though there was nothing to suggest the man was acting on Brady’s behalf, they said he could no longer get a fair trial.

The judge ruled that the issue could be dealt with by a warning from him that it may be dangerous to rely on Ms Staunton’s evidence.

Towards the end of the trial, Brady’s senior counsel Michael O’Higgins complained about the evidence of agents from the US Department of Homeland Security who had helped gardaí to find witnesses who would testify that Brady had admitted to killing Det Gda Donohoe.

In particular, Mr O’Higgins criticized a “letter of scope” that the agents had been issued by their employers which prevented them from talking about the immigration status of certain witnesses, including a key prosecution witness Daniel Cahill. The defence maintained that Mr Cahill gave evidence against Brady under threat of being sent home on the next available flight if he did not do so. Mr Cahill denied this and said he gave his testimony freely because he wanted justice for Det Gda Donohoe’s family.

Mr O’Higgins said the agents used the letters of scope to prevent “anything that would put them in a bad light coming out”. He said such latitude has never been shown to a witness in the history of the State, adding: “The idea that witnesses would come to court and say, here are a load of things we agree are relevant but I’m not going to answer questions about them. That idea is so out there that nobody has ever had the temerity to come into a court of law as a pivotal witness and announce what areas they are going to discuss and what areas they are not going to discuss.”

No date has yet been set for the appeal.