A 14-year-old boy stabbed in Tallaght last year died from a screwdriver blow that penetrated 8.5 cm into his brain, the deputy State pathologist told a jury yesterday.
The youth who admits stabbing him with the screwdriver turned on him after being refused a cigarette by a group of children in Cushlawn Park, Tallaght, on August 18th, 1998.
Mr Patrick Gageby, defending, told a jury they had to take the defendant's "youth and plain stupidity" into account and find him guilty of manslaughter and not the murder charge he faces.
The prosecution said the jury had to presume he intended to cause serious injury when he swung the screwdriver at the boy and that there was nothing in the evidence to suggest otherwise.
The youth, who was 16 at the time, admits attacking Ben Smyth outside his home at Cushlawn Park, Tallaght, on August 19th last year. He accepts he is guilty of manslaughter but denies murder.
The jury heard that in the days after the attack, the youth admitted to gardai that he had also hit the dead boy's brother, David Smyth.
The defendant, from Tallaght, who cannot be named because he was a minor, told gardai: "I know now the lad I stabbed that night was Ben Smyth. I don't know why I had the screwdriver. I found it in the field that night when we were drinking".
He said that earlier in the night, he and a friend drank cans of beer bought for them in a local pub by "an oul' fella" they met outside. He drank three cans of lager but denied that he drank more. He also denied that he had taken drugs or tablets prior to the attack. "I wasn't drunk," he told gardai.
Det Garda John Stack accepted under cross-examination that gardai had reason to believe the youth was playing down the amount of drink he had consumed. The youth said he and his friend ran out of cigarettes and went looking in Cushlawn Park for more. They asked "a load of young ones sitting on a wall" but were refused.
He claimed he had only hit each of the Smyth brothers once. Asked by gardai why he stabbed Ben, he said: "I didn't mean to stab him in the head, I just swung at him." Asked why he had the screwdriver, he replied, "I just did." The deputy State pathologist, Dr Marie Cassidy, told the court that Ben Smyth died from an injury that penetrated deep into the brain tissue. She said the wound entered the brain stem, the control centre of the brain, to a length of 8.5 cms.
Vital tissues of the brain were damaged beyond recovery, she said, and the injury was made worse by the haemorrhaging that accompanied it.
She also noted two abrasions to the forehead and bruising to the right shoulder.
In his closing speech to the jury, Mr Eamonn Leahy SC, prosecuting, told them that when they examined the evidence, and in particular the head and other injuries to Ben's brother, David, they would conclude "that at a very early stage, the screwdriver was being wielded and used".
His client's monosyllabic answers to gardai showed the mind of a juvenile unable to express himself, he said. "You can't look at what the reasonable man would have intended - because the reasonable man wouldn't have got involved in such a scrap - but what this young man intended", he told them. Mr Gageby said the way his client had acted on the night was "low and contemptible", and he had shown "a very large amount of plain stupidity", but the jury must still do him justice.
The jury will retire to consider their verdict after being charged by Mr Justice Smith today in the Central Criminal Court.