Troubling questions about trial of Holland

The conviction of Patrick Holland last week on a charge of possessing cannabis for the purposes of sale or supply and his imprisonment for 20 years are troubling. The Garda tactics in its handling of the case were suspect, the evidential basis for the conviction was hardly clear-cut and the sentence appeared disproportionate in the circumstances. The case also raises questions about drugs policy.

Before going further I want to acknowledge that the three judges who heard the case in the Special Criminal Court, Mr Justice Richard Johnson, Judge Patrick Smith and Judge Michael Reilly, are respected members of the High Court, Circuit Court and District Court benches respectively. They are judges of integrity and professionalism.

I offer this acknowledgement not in any perfunctory sense but because I know one of them personally (Mr Justice Johnson) and the other two by repute and I know each of them to be distinguished and scrupulously fair. My contention here is simply and respectfully that they got it wrong.

I also want to acknowledge at the outset that Patrick Holland is an unlikely candidate for victimhood. He has three previous criminal convictions. He was convicted in 1965 of receiving stolen goods, in 1981 of involvement in armed bank robberies and in 1989 of possession of commercial explosives and detonators.

The first curious element in the Patrick Holland case concerns the arrest of his solicitor, James Orange, on the very morning that Holland was arrested while disembarking from the ferry at Dun Laoghaire, on April 9th last.

The solicitor was released just at the time that Holland was charged. The effect of the arrest and detention of James Orange was to deprive Holland of the advice of his own solicitor while in Garda custody. The Supreme Court has held in The People (DPP) v Healy (1990) that there is a constitutional right to access to a solicitor.

James Orange was arrested in connection with an investigation by the Criminal Assets Bureau into the origins of the monies which financed the purchase of Patrick Holland's house in Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow. It strains credibility that the arrest and the length of detention of a solicitor whom gardai knew was the legal adviser of Patrick Holland happened by chance to coincide exactly with the arrest and period of detention of Holland. Holland was convicted on the evidence of an alleged accomplice, Charles Bowden, and on alleged admissions while in Garda custody. There was some minor, allegedly corroborating, evidence linking blank driving licences found in Holland's home and in the warehouse where a large consignment of cannabis was found.

The evidence of Charles Bowden must be viewed as highly suspect. He apparently has done a deal with gardai whereby he will avoid charges, probably in relation to the murder of Veronica Guerin, in return for giving incriminating evidence against a number of suspected major criminals, some of whom are suspected of involvement in that murder.

His incentive to give as damaging evidence as possible against others is considerable, and for that reason, his evidence must be treated with suspicion. It would seem therefore that the evidence of this alleged accomplice must require significantly more substantive corroboration than would apply normally to the evidence of accomplices. And yet the corroboration that applied in the Holland case was itself suspect. This was the Garda evidence of "admissions".

Patrick Holland is, on his past record, a hardened criminal. He is also, clearly, a clever manipulator, as he proved in his orchestrated media interviews of earlier this year. He believed, with a good deal of justification, that he would be charged with the murder of Veronica Guerin and, for this reason, fled the jurisdiction.

He agreed to return, allegedly on the advice of his solicitor, to face interrogation on the murder charge. Clearly he believed he was vulnerable to being "fitted up" by the Garda and for this reason obviously, he purchased sophisticated recording devices, intended to record his interviews with gardai.

How credible is it therefore that in the course of his 48-hour detention he made several admissions to gardai of involvement in the purchase and sale of illegal drugs? The gardai could have arranged for the interviews with Holland to be tape-recorded or videotaped, but chose not to do so. They said this was because there were no recording devices available at Lucan Garda station, where he was being held, and it was inconvenient to move him to a station where such facilities were in place. I am not alleging that any of the gardai who gave evidence in the case of such "admissions" were not telling the truth. I am merely suggesting that it was not beyond the bounds of reasonable doubt that Holland did not make such concessions and admissions.

And yet this is the sole corroborative evidence (apart from the minor corroboration about blank driving licences, to which the Special Criminal Court itself attached little significance) which the court relied on to uphold the evidence of the "supergrass" accomplice, Bowden.

And then there is the issue of the 20-year sentence. As Jim Cusack, this newspaper's Security Correspondent, reported on November 20th last, a few weeks before the sentencing of Holland another Dublin criminal, Russell Warren, was sentenced to just five years' imprisonment for possessing £2.7 million worth of cannabis. In July 1995 an English drug smuggler who had 700 kg of cannabis, with an estimated value of £2.7 million, received a seven-year sentence.

The evidence of Charles Bowden against Patrick Holland was that Holland received 35 kilos of cannabis per week over several months. Holland was not apprehended in possession of any drug, and yet he got four times the sentence Warren received and almost three times the sentence given to the English smuggler. The court was entitled to take into account Holland's previous convictions, but at the going rate, according to lawyers experienced in such criminal cases, the sentence should have been no more than 12 years, taking everything into consideration.

That anybody should be sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for the sale and supply of cannabis is ludicrous. Whatever harm (if any) cannabis causes to those who use it, it is puny compared with other legal substances, notably alcohol and tobacco. The contention that cannabis use leads inexorably to the use of hard drugs, notably heroin, is simply to ignore the hard evidence available here on heroin use.

The "gateway" to hard drugs here is not "soft" drugs but deprivation, as even a glimpse of the lovely coloured maps produced by Pat Rabbitte's Ministerial Task Force on hard drugs two years ago would establish.

And, incidentally, what is the appropriate sentence for a 58-year-old man, with Holland's previous record, who is convicted of dealing in heroin, if 20 years' imprisonment is to be the appropriate sentence for dealing in cannabis?