Judge rules Special Criminal Court can try Guerin accused

The High Court ruled yesterday that the trial of Mr Paul Ward for the murder of the journalist Veronica Guerin should proceed before the non-jury Special Criminal Court.

Mr Justice Carney also overturned a decision by the Special Criminal Court allowing lawyers for Mr Ward access to certain confidential statements made by informants to gardai.

The prosecution had indicated it would abandon the case rather than disclose the statements. It claimed disclosure could place lives at risk.

Mr Ward (33), a native of Windmill Park, Crumlin, with an address at Walkinstown Road, Dublin, has denied the murder of Ms Guerin at Naas Road, Clondalkin, on June 26th, 1996.

His trial opened before the Special Criminal Court on January 20th and was adjourned the following day to facilitate judicial review proceedings taken by the DPP challenging the court's decision to allow Mr Ward's lawyers access to 40 confidential statements by 20 persons.

Mr Ward also initiated judicial review proceedings challenging the decision to have him tried before the non-jury court. He contended that the court's decision that it would read 20 other statements had prejudiced his chance of a fair trial. Both sets of proceedings were heard simultaneously before Mr Justice Carney earlier this month.

Delivering judgment yesterday, the judge upheld the challenge by the DPP to the decision to disclose the 40 statements to Mr Ward's lawyers. In the second set of proceedings, he refused the orders sought by Mr Ward.

The judge said what was involved was a potential conflict between the rights of the people to have organised crime effectively combated by the Garda, the rights of those providing information to the Garda about organised crime to be protected and the right of Mr Ward to a fair trial.

The judge said the evidence of Assistant Commissioner Tony Hickey established that the Garda had to deal with organised crime as well as crime in its traditional forms.

"Those engaged in such crime require a wall of silence to surround their activities and believe that its maintenance is necessary for their protection," he said. "They have at their disposal the resources, including money and firearms, to maintain this wall of silence, and will resort to any means, including murder, in furtherance of this objective."

Mr Justice Carney said that to deal with such crime the Garda had to collect information in confidence from those willing to provide it. Those willing to provide such information "know that they could face a death sentence if this co-operation became known".

Should such confidence be breached, the Assistant Commissioner had testified it would become virtually impossible to investigate serious crime.

Dealing with the DPP's application to quash the Special Criminal Court order, the judge said it was in his experience unique that such an order should be sought during a trial. In most cases any question of judicial review should be dealt with after the trial. But such an approach in the present case would have led the DPP to abort the trial and the people would have been deprived of their right to have "a particularly heinous crime" prosecuted to a verdict of either conviction or acquittal.

It was his view that the Special Criminal Court had, in deciding to disclose the documents to Mr Ward's lawyers, exceeded its jurisdiction in fundamentally altering the established relationship between defence lawyers and their client. It was no answer that Mr Ward had consented to his legal team having sight of the statements on the terms that they were not to be disclosed to him without leave of the court. Mr Justice Carney said the Special Criminal Court would examine the 40 statements and determine whether any of them might help the defence case, help to disparage the prosecution case or give a lead to other evidence. On the basis of that examination, the court would determine which, if any, of the statements should be disclosed to the defence.

In conducting its examination of the documents, the court would be exposed to material prejudicial to Mr Ward, Mr Justice Carney said. He accepted the court's assurance that it would nevertheless be able to deal with the case fairly. He did not consider it necessary that the Ward case be dealt with by the ordinary courts.