The Court of Criminal Appeal has dismissed the appeal by Brian Meehan against his conviction for the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin 10 years ago.
Meehan (41), of Crumlin, Dublin, is the only person serving a sentence for Ms Guerin's murder on June 26th, 1996. He was jailed for life by the non-jury Special Criminal Court in July 1999 and was also given a concurrent jail sentence of 20, 12, 10 and five years for drugs and firearms offences.
Meehan had appealed against his conviction for all of the offences.
The Special Criminal Court found after a 31-day trial that Meehan was the driver of the motorbike from which a gunman fired six shots into Ms Guerin as she sat in her car at traffic lights on the Naas Road.
Meehan's appeal was delayed because of various appeals brought by John Gilligan, the leader of the drugs gang of which Meehan was a member, and whose final appeal against his drugs conviction was rejected by the Supreme Court in November last year.
Giving the judgment of the three-judge appeal court yesterday, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns said the court dismissed all the appeals against conviction in the case.
Retired Det Supt Todd O'Loughlin, one of the main Garda officers in the Guerin murder investigation, was in court for the hearing.
Meehan's counsel, Patrick Gageby SC, had argued during a two-day appeal that the trial court should not have accepted evidence of telephone traffic between Meehan's mobile phone and the mobile phone of Russell Warren on the day of the murder as corroboration of Warren's evidence.
Warren, who is in the witness protection programme, told the trial that he followed Ms Guerin from Naas District Court to Clondalkin, was in contact by mobile phone with Meehan who was the driver of a stolen motorbike, and saw the pillion passenger shoot Ms Guerin.
Replying to Mr Gageby, State counsel Peter Charleton SC submitted that the pattern and timing of the calls between Meehan and Warren was corroborative of Warren's testimony.
He said there were calls between Warren and Meehan up to six minutes before the murder at 12.54pm on June 26th, 1996, and after that there was only one call between them, at 13.23pm.
Mr Charleton said that apart from that one call, all of Warren's calls after the murder were with Gilligan. Gilligan, who was cleared of the Guerin murder, is serving a 20-year jail sentence for importing drugs.
In the Court of Criminal Appeal's 62-page judgment, Mr Justice Kearns said the most important thing to be said about corroboration is that it was not a prerequisite to a conviction where the main evidence against an accused was that of an accomplice.
A corroboration warning, not corroboration, was the mandatory requirement. It was "common case" that Warren was an accomplice and that the Special Criminal Court gave itself a warning about the dangers of acting on uncorroborated accomplice evidence.
The Court of Criminal Appeal believed the Special Criminal Court was entitled to conclude and hold that the telephone traffic constituted corroborative evidence in respect of the evidence given by Warren, he said.
Both the frequency and the pattern of phone calls between Meehan and Warren and between Warren and Gilligan was "striking".
The telephone calls, at 12.33pm and 12.35pm, to Meehan supported Warren's evidence as to the time during which he was following the victim and pointing out where she was going, the judge added.
The Court of Criminal Appeal was also satisfied that the Special Criminal Court had adequate evidence to convict Meehan for the drugs and firearms offences, the judge added.