Amid the devastation to lives and careers, there emerged from the Brian Murphy trial last week an enhanced integrity for an institution at the heart of the criminal justice system: the jury, writes Vincent Browne.
Twelve men and women gave careful and painfuls deliberation to the evidence presented to them and arrived at verdicts that most considered fair, even though on one charge they were unable to reach agreement.
The treatment of juries is standard. Twelve men and women are summoned to the courts under threat of penalty, not told how to find their way, not introduced to the requirements of juries, made sit around for hours outside the court while legal argument takes place, required to attend for weeks on end, irrespective of the consequences to their lives and livelihoods.
At a symposium on the criminal justice system at the King's Inns last Saturday, the venerable barrister Paddy MacEntee made these points and complained about the treatment of juries. He asked why legal argument could not take place before the trial formally started and a jury was empanelled; why provision could not be made in the courts for the accommodation of juries; why there were no instruction procedures for juries on what was required of them; why they were not told of the relevant law at the outset of trials as well as at the conclusion.
He and others who spoke, including the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, protested their faith in the jury system and how integral it was to criminal justice. Asked why the non-jury Special Criminal Court remained in being, in the absence of evidence of the intimidation of juries, Mr McDowell gave the customary response: that the protection of the State required this given the persistence of subversive conspiracies (why jury courts could not be trusted to deal with subversive as well as "ordinary" crime and why the Special Criminal Court was used to try non-subversive cases remained unexplained).
Another issue that remained unexplained at the symposium was why there remains a mandatory life sentence for murder. The two most senior judges in our courts system, the Chief Justice, Ronan Keane, and the President of the High Court, Joe Finnegan, have both called for the removal of mandatory sentences.
There are persuasive arguments for that: first, life sentences don't mean life, and we make a mockery of the system by pretending otherwise. Second, some murders are of such heinousness that they deserve sentences of special severity to distinguish them from other murders, and mandatory life sentences fail to allow for that.
And third, the fact of mandatory sentences causes murder cases to be contested, court time wasted, huge legal costs incurred; all of which could be avoided if there was discretion for judges to moderate sentences in the light of a guilty plea, as happens in other criminal cases.
Mr McDowell again set his face against such reform, arguing that the deliberate taking of human life was of such outrageousness that it needed to be distinguished by the penalty of mandatory life sentences - an argument that ignores the fact that a person can be convicted of murder without deliberately intending to take the life of the victim.
Mr McDowell departed from his prepared speech to take a shot at the Governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan, over drugs in prison. He said the practice of providing for drug-free units in prisons, with the implication that other areas were not drug-free, was intolerable, a "catastrophe" no less, for it prevented the rehabilitation of prisoners, perpetuated criminality even within the prison system, and fed back into society with ongoing problems of addiction and crime.
John Lonergan countered robustly. We should be aiming at a drug-free society. Drugs in Mountjoy were not manufactured there but came from outside, and the penal system should not be loaded with the responsibility for dealing with wider social problems with their origin in deprivation and alienation.
Asked if his stance meant that physical contact between prisoners and immediate family should, if necessary, be prevented during visits, Mr McDowell said "Yes" and went on to claim that that might not be necessary - the clear implication was that if it were deemed necessary as a means of keeping drugs out of prisons, then so be it.
The widespread conviction that society is imperilled by rising crime rates that can be abated only by tougher laws and rougher sentences and prison conditions wilfully (very often) ignores the reality that the crime rate here has been low by international standards (while our prison population remains the highest in Europe on a per-capita basis); that the crime rate has not been escalating (it has fluctuated around the same levels for almost 20 years); and that most criminality derives from inequality and poverty.
Or at least the phenomenon that we identify as criminality does. Another facet of crime (that committed by the richer elements of society) hardly gets any attention at all from the criminal justice system.