Alan Harte has lost his High Court bid to set aside his conviction and 30-year prison sentence for his role in the kidnapping and attack on businessman Kevin Lunney.
Harte (42) was tried and sentenced at the three-judge Special Criminal Court in December 2021 for committing serious harm to and falsely imprisoning the Quinn Industrial Holdings (QIH) director in 2019.
He challenged the constitutionality of a section of the 1939 Offences Against the State Act that permits a two-thirds majority verdict at the non-jury court and that an accused is not informed whether the court’s verdict is a unanimous or majority decision.
He claimed he was entitled to the same trial in a non-jury court as an accused would receive in a jury court. Without this, his treatment before the court was unfair and unlawful, he alleged.
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Ruling against him on Monday, Ms Justice Marguerite Bolger said a person tried before the Special Criminal Court does not enjoy a right to a “mirror image” of the trial process before a jury court.
Harte was not in a similar or comparable position to a person tried before the jury courts because he was subjected to a process provided for by article 38.3 of the Constitution, she said.
“There is nothing unlawful about that”, she said, given the exception to a jury trial that has been put in place by the Oireachtas and the Government is itself constitutional. It does not breach his constitutional rights to equality or to a trial in accordance with law, she found.
He does not enjoy a right to a similar five-sixths majority verdict or to know about any dissenting decision, she said.
Ms Justice Bolger dismissed his judicial review challenge.
A Special Criminal Court judge said Harte, of Island Quay Apartments, East Wall, Dublin, but now of Portlaoise Prison, had a “ringleader” role in the kidnapping of Mr Lunney at a yard in Drumbrade, Ballinagh, Co Cavan. He was tried alongside three other accused persons at the Special Criminal Court.
The trial heard Mr Lunney was driving home when he was dragged from his vehicle by two men. Harte approached, held a Stanley knife to Mr Lunney’s face and told him to get into the boot of a car, the court heard.
Harte drove with his two accomplices and took Mr Lunney to the remote farmyard where they stripped him to his boxer shorts, doused him in bleach, shattered his shin bone with two blows of a wooden bat, punched and kicked him, sliced his face with a Stanley knife and carved the letters QIH into his chest.
The men told Mr Lunney to resign from his position with QIH and end legal proceedings he was involved with in Belfast and Dublin.
Harte’s co-accused Alan O’Brien, of Shelmalier Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, and Darren Redmond, from Caledon Road, East Wall, were jailed for 25 and 18 years respectively, with the last three years of Redmond’s sentence suspended on conditions.
