A man who assisted his father in the drug-related murder of the accused's best friend was jailed for five years for being an accessory to murder.
Mr Mark Dwyer (23) was tortured to death after being abducted from his Dublin flat and interrogated over a missing bag of Ecstacy tablets worth £40,000.
Mr Scott Delaney (28) was subsequently convicted of the murder, but his conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal earlier this year. His father, Joe Delaney is currently serving a life sentence for Mark Dwyer's murder on December 14th,1996.
Scott Delaney is already serving 10 years for falsely imprisoning Mr Dwyer at Foster Terrace, Ballybough, Dublin. In October last, he pleaded guilty to being an accessory to murder.
Yesterday the Central Criminal Court heard that the deceased was taken from his flat and tortured following the disappearance of the bag of Ecstacy tablets. Prosecuting counsel Mr Patrick Gageby SC told the court that the £40,000 was part of the "war chest" of a drugs gang headed by Joseph Delaney.
Det Sgt Gerard McDonald, Fitzgibbon Street, told the court that the deceased had been taken from his flat in Ballybough to a house rented by Joseph Delaney outside Naas, Co Kildare.
Sentencing Scott Delaney to five years, Mr Justice Paul Carney said the language of accessory to murder was to give "comfort, assist and maintain" the perpetrator. This, he said, translates into "not shopping your Dad". Normally, this would be the natural course of events, but in this case his father had threatened his life and was a particularly dangerous individual. He backdated the sentence to run from December 17th, 1996, the date the accused was taken into custody.