The quashing of the conviction of Paul Ward for the murder of Veronica Guerin will cause great distress to the Guerin family, which has lost a mother, wife, sister and daughter.
This follows the acquittal of John Gilligan on similar charges a year ago. The family deserves the continuing sympathy of all as they see the campaign to bring her murderers to justice gradually unravel. The disappointment of the Garda is also understandable. They were placed under intense public pressure to find and convict the perpetrators of this cowardly attack, and were provided with methods for doing so never tried before in this jurisdiction.
A crucial weapon in the armoury offered to the Garda in pursuing the murderers of Veronica Guerin was the Witness Protection Programme, and this suffered a most serious blow in yesterday's judgment. The Court of Criminal Appeal left no doubt about the wisdom of future reliance on uncorroborated evidence from the accomplices of those accused of serious crimes. The dangers in such evidence are obvious and were pointed out in this newspaper by Supreme Court judge, Mr Adrian Hardiman, then a senior counsel, when Paul Ward was first convicted. "Accomplice evidence may be largely true (for example as to his own role) but false in its implication of another person or persons a general appearance of truth which makes any inventions (is) hard to detect," he wrote. "If the accomplice is a hardened criminal his evidence is always profoundly suspect and a conviction relying on it, in the absence of corroboration, will be rare."
Such evidence is bound to be suspect if the accomplice can be shown to benefit significantly from giving it. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Veronica Guerin cases is that the one man we know to have been directly involved in the murder, Charles Bowden, who by his own admission prepared and loaded the gun that killed her, was released from prison a year ago and is now living abroad at tax-payers' expense. The Fine Gael spokesman on justice, Mr Alan Shatter, is right to call for this programme to be put on a statutory footing, with proper controls.
While many will be disappointed by yesterday's judgment, it demonstrates in a decisive manner the integrity of our legal system, and the courage and independence of the judges on the Court of Criminal Appeal. They made an unpopular decision in order to uphold fundamental legal principles and underline the need to secure convictions on the basis of reliable evidence. That, in the long run, is our society's best defence against those who commit serious crimes.