THE Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday ordered a retrial of the Cork man found guilty of the murder of Valerie Linehan by a Central Criminal Court jury last May.
Mr Justice O'Flaherty, giving the court's decision, said Gerard Mullane (35), MacCurtain Street, and the dead woman had been living together for seven months before the fatality. She apparently had a miscarriage after about seven or eight weeks of pregnancy shortly before her death on December 4th, 1994. The judge said Mullane and the woman seemed to have consumed a considerable amount of alcohol that day.
Mr Justice O'Flaherty, giving the court's decision, said Gerard Mullane (35), MacCurtain Street, and the dead woman had been living together for seven months before the fatality. She apparently had a miscarriage after about seven or eight weeks of pregnancy shortly before her death on December 4th, 1994. The judge said; Mullane and the woman seemed to have consumed a considerable amount of alcohol that day.
In the course of a row, Mullane claimed, Ms Linehan had taunted him with lack of sexual prowess: her miscarriage came, about because he had not; "enough sperm" in him. He stabbed her twice and in addition manual strangulation was applied.
There had been only one element in the defence that Mullane put before the jury: that he was provoked by the woman's words. Mr Justice O'Flaherty said that while undoubtedly the prosecution case was strong, the Court of Criminal Appeal believed there was a material lack of direction to the jury in the trial judge's summing up in relation to provocation.
Since the only point in the case was whether such provocation existed so as to reduce the offence to manslaughter, the appeal would be allowed and the conviction quashed. The court ordered a retrial.