Garda leaks to media 'stopped fair trial'
Pre-trial publicity meant a woman jailed for the murder of her husband did not get a fair trial, her lawyer argued today.
Catherine Nevin was subjected to “trial by media” after gardai leaked information against her, an appeal court heard.
Newspaper articles printed after the death of pub landlord Tom Nevin were caused by “massive garda leaking” and would have been extremely stressful for Mrs Nevin, it was argued.
Nevin, 51, was jailed for life in April 2000 after she was found guilty of murder and soliciting three men to murder her husband.
During the high-profile trial – the longest in Irish legal history – two juries were discharged before a third delivered a guilty verdict.
Mrs Nevin did not leave Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison for the start of her appeal, at which her lawyer Patrick MacEntee outlined the “systematic campaign of leaking” by gardai to the media.
He told Dublin’s three-judge Court of Criminal Appeal that officers were responsible for week after week of revelations constituting a “serious abuse” of the trial process.
“The trial was an extremely stressful trial for everyone concerned, but most importantly for Mrs Nevin,” he said.
“We say that the purpose of giving journalists access to material was to circulate and allow to enter into the public mind the theory that Mr Nevin was killed by way of a contract killing as opposed to a robbery.”
Mr Nevin died at the end of St Patrick’s weekend celebrations in 1996 at Jack White’s Inn, the Co Wicklow pub the couple ran together.
He was shot dead as he counted the takings from the weekend in what the prosecution later called a botched robbery designed to conceal a contract killing carried out at the behest of his wife.
Mr MacEntee said the effect of articles in both the national and regional media was that jurors were likely to have been influenced.
“Its purpose can only be to prejudice a fair trial by giving information to the public at large, including jurors, and I say that is to prejudice a fair trial,” he said.
He added that the gardai were at fault for the leaks, and not the media, adding: “I am not at all saying that the newspapers did anything wrong, the newspapers got the story and published it... The abuse is by the police who leaked the files or the content of the files to the media.”
Gardai had no legal entitlement to leak information to the press, Mr MacEntee said.
He argued it would be impossible to tell who was influenced, who remembered newspaper articles and what they remembered, but there was a “substantial risk” of prejudice.
Miss Justice Carroll imposed a life sentence for murder and three concurrent sentences of seven years on Nevin for soliciting three men to murder her husband on different dates in 1989 and 1990.
Following sentencing Nevin’s lawyers immediately sought leave to appeal, citing 20 grounds.
Mrs Nevin’s case against the Director of Public Prosecutions is expected to last three to four days.
