EXECUTION THAT PLACED JUSTICE IN THE DOCK
In 1882, Myles Joyce was hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, the truth about his trial is finally laid bare
IT was ten days before Christmas when Myles Joyce was taken from his prison cell to the gallows. Given the situation he found himself in, it is hardly surprising that his last recorded words were emotive ones. ‘I’m going before my God,’ he said in his native Irish. ‘I am as innocent as a child in the cradle.’
Though it has, of course, come far too late to do him any practical good, Joyce’s name has finally been vindicated more than 130 years after his death. A statement issued on behalf of Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan last week said Cabinet approval had been given for Michael D Higgins ‘to grant a posthumous presidential pardon’ in this notorious case.
Now, the full story of how Joyce was framed for the brutal slaying of a family in the west of Ireland is to be told in a new documentary titled Murdair Mhám Trasna (Murder in Maamtrasna).
This disturbing saga begins in the summer of 1882 in a remote mountain community on the Galway-Mayo border.
At the time, Maamtrasna – situated just a mile from the shores of Lough Mask – was home to around 250 families eking out a meagre living from the land.
On the morning of August 18, John Collins – one of the local tenant farmers – called in on his neighbours, the Joyces (no relation to the previously mentioned Myles). The fact that the door of their tiny cottage had been ripped off its hinges was the first sign of something being amiss.
Inside, he found the man of the house, John Joyce, lying naked and dead with two gunshot wounds to the body. Collins immediately rushed away to summon help from other local residents.
WHEN they returned, there were even more grisly sights to be found. John’s wife Bridget had been killed with a vicious blow across the right eye that crushed her skull. Her 17-year-old son Michael was still alive after being shot in the head and stomach, but he subsequently died.
Another child, Peggy, had been bludgeoned to death. Beside her on the bed was the lifeless figure of her grandmother, who had a deep wound to the forehead. According to reports, there were bullet marks on the walls of the kitchen. Whimpering, the two family dogs were too scared to leave the house.
Only the Joyces’ ten-year-old son Patsy survived the bloodbath. An older sibling, Martin, had been working as a farmhand in a neighbouring area and was away when the attack happened.
Two days after the killings, The Times of London recorded: ‘No ingenuity can exaggerate the brutal ferocity of a crime which spared neither the grey hairs of an aged woman nor the innocent child of 12 years who slept beside her.
‘It is an outburst of unredeemed and inexplicable savagery before which one stands appalled, and oppressed with a painful sense of the failure of our vaunted civilisation.’
Even by the time those words appeared in print, however, the sequence of events that led to a wrongful execution was already well under way. The day after the bodies were discovered, three men – all related to the victims – went to the authorities and claimed to have secretly tailed ten men en route to carry out the murders. Among the men they named was Myles Joyce.
The suspects were duly rounded up and brought before magistrates in Cong, Co. Mayo, to be charged. They were later transferred to Dublin where they stood trial at Green Street Courthouse in the heart of the inner city.
By any reckoning, the trial itself was hardly a model of best practice in criminal justice. The proceedings were carried out in English, even though none of the accused could speak the language. Meanwhile, they were represented by a 24-year-old defence lawyer from Trinity College who didn’t have a word of Irish.
Eight of the defendants were convicted; five of them were jailed for life, but the remainder – including Myles – were sentenced to be hanged. It is now accepted four of those jailed were also innocent.
As the three men facing the noose awaited their fate at Galway Prison, one of them, Pat Casey, signed a declaration in front of the governor insisting that Joyce had nothing to do with the murders. Only days before giving birth to their fifth child, Myles’s wife Bridget also pleaded for a last-minute reprieve. ‘I publicly confess before high Heaven that he never committed the crime nor left his house that night,’ she wrote. ‘Will the evidence of two informers, the perpetrators of the deed, hang an innocent man?’
At 8.15am on December 15, 1882, Myles Joyce and the two other condemned men were escorted to the gallows. He had earlier told a family member: ‘If there’s a God in Heaven, there is no rope in Galway fit to hang me.’
Joyce recited the responses to the prayers being read out by the chaplain, but continued to jabber away in an agitated manner that even seasoned Irish speakers at the scene found difficult to understand. At one point, he said: ‘It is a poor thing to take this life away on a stage, but I have my priest with me.’
Even his final moments weren’t easy. When the hangman pulled the lever on the gallows, there was a problem with the mechanism. According to a newspaper report at the time, he ‘was not killed as rapidly as the others’ and ‘struggled for some time before succumbing’.
It was a little over 18 months later when Tom Casey, whose evidence had played a key role in Joyce’s conviction, walked into Tourmakeady church during a Confirmation ceremony. Carrying a lighted candle, he approached the altar and told Dr John MacEvilly – the Archbishop of Tuam – of his part in a blameless man’s death.
Following representations by the archbishop, there were debates on the matter at Westminster involving Charles Stewart Parnell, William Gladstone, Randolph Churchill and other notable figures. It was over a century later when Fr Jarlath Waldron, who wrote a book about the murders, shed some more light on the subject. Though no definitive motive was established, there were suggestions that the murders were linked to a row over sheep rustling or the betrayal of secret societies.
IT subsequently emerged that the fifth Earl Spencer – a direct ancestor of Princes William and Harry, and then serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – had a shady-looking role in the entire affair. The three men who claimed to be witnesses to the murders were paid £1,250 (around €157,000 today) for what is now considered to be perjured evidence. For his part, Lord Spencer insisted the payments were for ‘courageous and praiseworthy conduct in the pursuit and prosecution of the murderers’.
Acting on advice from the Attorney General’s office, ex-taoiseach Enda Kenny ordered a review into the case by legal academic Dr Niamh Howlin. Her report concluded that the ‘trial, conviction and execution of Myles Joyce were unfair of the standards of criminal justice at the time’.
Among those to take a keen interest in the controversy was former Liberal Democrat MP David Alton, who has close family connections in Maamtrasna. Now Lord Alton of Liverpool, he told the makers of the film: ‘To have a fair trial, you need to be able to understand the accusations that are being made against you.
‘You need to be able to understand the evidence being given by your accusers, and you need to be able to understand the directions of the judge. If you can’t understand any of these, it makes it impossible to have a fair trial.’
President Higgins put it even more succinctly when he was interviewed. ‘Everything that happened at that level of the State was horrendous,’ he said. ‘There was bribery involved. The accused didn’t get a chance to defend themselves. There wasn’t an atmosphere of equality and there was no equality as regards legal processes at that time.’