The Court of Criminal Appeal today published a judgment explaining the reasons it dismissed Brian Kearney’s appeal against his conviction for the 2006 murder of his wife Siobhán at their Dublin home.
Mr Kearney (52) was found guilty at the Central Criminal Court in March 2008 of murdering his wife, the mother of their young son, at their home at Knocknashee, Goatstown, on February 28th, 2006, his 49th birthday.
The judgment outlines why the court rejected each ground of appeal brought by Mr Kearney against his murder conviction.
Mr Kearney had contended that “the learned trial judge erred in law and in fact in permitting the admission into evidence of a diary or any part or mention thereof”.
The applicant further contended that the trial was unsatisfactory by reason of the prosecution leading an amount of evidence which was both intended and actually conveyed to the jury that had exercised his right to silence during questioning in garda custody.
Giving reasons today as to why it upheld the murder conviction at a hearing last July, the three-judge court said the it did not accept the defence complaint that the quality of the circumstantial evidence in the case was poor.
“On the contrary, the compelling nature of that evidence was such as to exclude every other reasonable possibility in the case”.
The court said it accepted as the defence now does, that Siobhan Kearney did not commit suicide, and that the appeal had been effectively been “transformed into an invitation to the court, without any evidence in support, to speculate that some unknown intruder, with no apparent motive whatsoever, entered this private dwelling house between 7.40am and 9.30am on the date in question, there murdered Siobhan Kearney, did not steal or remove any belongings, came and went unseen at a busy time of morning, and who, finally and inexplicably, contrived to make the murder look like a suicide”.
The court, led by Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, found this probability, measured in the context of all the evidence that was given, to be so remote and unlikely as to be off any scale of either probability or possibility.