In deciding that John Gilligan was guilty of drug crimes, the Special Criminal Court had applied common sense and shrewdness after it had "scoured" the evidence, counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions told the Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday.
Mr Peter Charleton SC rejected arguments that the non-jury court had behaved in a profoundly illogical way in finding Gilligan guilty of having cannabis resin for sale and supply but acquitting him on charges of murdering the journalist Veronica Guerin and possessing firearms.
Gilligan's conviction was "squarely based" on the evidence of an accomplice, John Dunne, supported by the evidence of other accomplices, Charles Bowden and Russell Warren, Mr Charleton said.
These and a series of other facts and circumstantial evidence all showed that Gilligan was involved with a drugs gang and that he began to import cannabis in 1994.
Mr Charleton said the Special Criminal Court, in deciding how it would deal with the evidence of the accomplice witnesses at Gilligan's trial, had set a standard for itself far higher than the standard set for a jury in an ordinary criminal trial.
This was an unnecessarily high standard, but even given that the court could have set a lower standard, it still convicted Gilligan on the basis of the higher standard. Its decision to find Gilligan guilty of having cannabis resin for sale and supply was "a flawless piece of jury reasoning" predicated and based on principles of law which were unnecessarily stringent. The trial court had unimpeachably set out the nature of the corroboration in the case through analysing the circumstantial evidence.
Accomplice evidence was admissible and sufficient to ground a conviction, whether that evidence was corroborated or not. Submissions from the defence also avoided the fact that circumstantial evidence could amount to corroboration.
Yesterday was the fifth day of the appeal by Gilligan against his conviction on charges of importing and possessing cannabis resin for sale and supply. He was jailed for 28 years in March 2001 after a 45-day trial before the Special Criminal Court. The appeal opened on July 1st.
Submissions for Gilligan concluded yesterday, after which Mr Charleton began his submissions opposing the appeal. He will continue those submissions today.
The DPP is opposing all the grounds of appeal and is contending that the fundamental tenor of the submissions on Gilligan's behalf is to reargue the facts of his case before the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Earlier yesterday Mr Michael O'Higgins SC, for Gilligan, said this was a difficult case involving deeply flawed witnesses and a deeply flawed process. He urged the appeal court, when considering its judgment, to look closely at various Northern Ireland cases dealing with supergrass evidence. Those cases stressed that justice, according to law, demanded proper evidence which was so manifestly reliable that it established matters beyond reasonable doubt.
He said the Special Criminal Court's judgment on Gilligan set out two different applications of law to the same facts. It had refused to convict him of murder or possession of firearms on the basis that that would mean a finding of guilt by association, yet it was on precisely that basis that the court had convicted Gilligan on the drugs charges.