A republican sympathiser who tried to ship three semi-automatic weapons to Northern Ireland is to request a suspended sentence before a Florida court on the grounds that the offence was committed before the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
Margaret Bannon, a doctor and a lawyer, was arrested after the guns and ammunition fell out of a container in a Dublin sorting office.
Ms Bannon's lawyer, Mr Peter Kenny, said yesterday that although the agreement had no legal standing before the US courts, it could be used in a mitigation plea, especially as people convicted of much more serious terrorist offences had already been released from prisons in Britain and Ireland.
He said that he intended to study the wording of the agreement and present it as a mitigating factor when Ms Bannon is sentenced on May 23rd next.
Mr Kenny said he will also plead that Ms Bannon suffers serious mental and physical problems, and had recently undergone an operation to stop epileptic seizures.
Ms Bannon was charged with an illegal export of weapons last January, only four days before the statute of limitations was due to run out in the case.
A US customs official told an Orlando courtroom at that time that the case should have been dealt with a long time ago but Irish authorities had delayed the return of the evidence to the United States.
Federal prosecutors eventually asked the US Justice Department to make a formal request before Irish authorities complied.
In a plead agreement signed at the end of February, Ms Bannon agreed that she bought the guns in Orlando gun shops and had tried to ship them to a house she owned in Derry. She also agreed that she had wrapped the guns and ammunition inside a protective device designed to hide them from customs x-ray machines. Ms Bannon was linked to the guns by one of a number of books that lay over the weapons.