COMPLAINTS ABOUT Garda treatment of suspects in criminal trials has virtually disappeared in the Central Criminal Court in recent years, according to the senior judge of the court, Mr Justice Paul Carney.
He was giving his inaugural lecture as adjunct professor of law in NUI Maynooth last night on the topic, 42 Years of the Guards in Court. Mr Justice Carney is also adjunct professor of law in UCC.
He said that in earlier years, in virtually every case there had been an issue in relation to confessions relied upon by the prosecution. “This was a time when forensic evidence scarcely existed, and the confession was very heavily relied upon in any prosecution,” he said.
The voir-dire (trial within a trial) would revolve around allegations of physical ill-treatment of varying degrees, he said. There would also be allegations that the prisoner was moved from station to station so that his solicitor could not find him, or that a member of the investigating team masqueraded as a solicitor or a priest to trick the prisoner into a confession.
He said that at that time a very senior detective swore in all his cases that all his prisoners volunteered at the end of their interrogations the words, “Ye were all very good to me.”
He said that little had been said or written about the Heavy Gang, the group of gardaí who were alleged to have assaulted and threatened suspects and used other forms of pressure on them during the 1970s.
The persons involved had believed they were under pressure in troubled times to secure confessions and convictions, and acted out of this “misguided and wholly inexcusable motivation, rather than wholly gratuitous badness”, he said.
The Criminal Justice Act 1984 and the regulations made under it introduced a code to ensure the appropriate treatment of persons detained in a Garda station.
The jewel in its crown was the provision for the video-recording of interviews, which was not brought into operation for about 20 years.
During this time it was piloted in a handful of stations, and gardaí could and did avoid it by the simple expedient of bringing their prisoners to other stations, he said.
The Criminal Justice Act is now in full operation, and it is routine for defence counsel to announce at the beginning of a trial that there is no issue in relation to the arrest, detention and treatment of the accused, he said.
However, he did not put this down solely to the full operation of the Act, because it had already come to pass before video-recording was mandatory.
“Video-recording cannot cure everything. I think it may be that a fundamental decency which has always been there has reasserted itself in the guards and this is worth recording and acknowledging,” he said.
Referring to earlier times, he recalled the era of Sergeant “Lugs” Brannigan, who was reported by newspapers as saying that he had to give the defendant a few taps with his black gloves to restrain him.
He enjoyed the respect of the community, the bench and those he prosecuted, he said. “Nowadays, in more politically correct times, he would probably be abolished by the Garda Ombudsman Commission and possibly also prosecuted.”