Gillane appeal against conviction dismissed

An appeal by Patrick Gillane against his conviction for soliciting two men to murder his wife was dismissed at the Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday.

Mr Justice Lynch said the court would next week hear Gillane's appeal against the severity of his eight-year sentence.

On December 8th, 1997, after a six-day trial, a jury unanimously found Gillane (36), from near Gort, Co Galway, guilty of soliciting Mr Christopher Bolger and Mr Michael Doyle in Dublin at a date unknown between January 1st, 1994, and January 31st, 1994, to murder Philomena Gillane.

Her body was found in the boot of her car at Athlone railway station on May 18th, 1994. She was seven months pregnant and had been shot and stabbed. No one has ever been charged or convicted of her murder.

During his trial, the main evidence against Gillane was that of Mr Bolger and Mr Doyle.

Following the discovery of Mrs Gillane's body, Mr Bolger said he saw a photograph of Gillane in the Irish Independent while Mr Doyle said he saw Gillane on the television news.

Both said they recognised Gillane as the man who had approached them in his car on a Sunday in January 1994. During the trial, Mr Bolger said that the man had asked them to "kill a woman who worked in a hospital" while Mr Doyle said the man had asked them to kill "his wife".

Delivering the judgment yesterday on Gillane's application for leave to appeal against his conviction, Mr Justice Lynch, sitting with Mr Justice O'Higgins and Mr Justice Quirke, said that while the two men "may be and indeed were down and out", their sworn testimony "must be given the same attention and respect as the testimony of the better dressed and the more comfortably circumstanced".

There was no forensic evidence in the case and it turned wholly on whose evidence should be believed - that of Mr Bolger and Mr Doyle or that of Gillane.

The resolution of that question was quintessentially a matter for a jury, which returned a unanimous verdict of guilty. He said evidence given by Mr Bolger - that he had a microchip inserted in his head during an operation at the Mater Hospital 20 years ago - was "totally peripheral and irrelevant to the issues in this case" and did not constitute grounds for withdrawing the case from the jury's consideration.

The fact that Mr Bolger had "very strange ideas about what was done to him when he had an operation on his head some 20 years before in the Mater Hospital does not mean he was incapable of giving evidence," the judge said.

"Certainly the ideas that Mr Bolger expressed as to what was done to him are inaccurate and impossible but on the other hand he emerges from the transcripts of evidence as a positive, clear and forceful witness of the events which he describes."

Mr Justice Lynch also rejected defence submissions that the trial judge should have directed the jury to acquit on the grounds that there was no evidence of a joint solicitation to murder Mrs Gillane.

Lawyers for Gillane had further argued that the purported identifications of Gillane - by Mr Bolger in Galway District Court and by Mr Doyle in a Galway Garda station - were flawed and lacked evidential weight.

They also complained that the two men were taken together in a Garda car to point out relevant locations, that their statements were read over to them in the presence of each other on at least two mornings during the trial and that a Garda sergeant had entered the courtroom during the evidence of Mr Bolger contrary to an exclusion order made by the trial judge.

Mr Justice Lynch said all the matters referred to were for the decision of the trial judge who had dealt with them in "exemplary fashion". There was no challenge to the trial judge's charge to the jury, which had included all the warnings regarding visual identification.