HERDA APPEAL UNDER WAY
A 30-YEAR-OLD woman who drove a man who loved her into a deep harbour, where he drowned, has opened an appeal against her conviction.
Marta Herda, of Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, knew her passenger could not swim when she drove her Volkswagen Passat through the crash barriers at South Quay, Arklow, shortly before 6 a.m. on March 26, 2013.
Herda had pleaded not guilty to the murder of 31-year-old Hungarian man Csaba Orsos, but a jury at the Central Criminal Court found her guilty and she was given the mandatory life sentence by Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy on July 28, 2016.
The Central Criminal Court heard that the Polish waitress escaped through the driver’s window at the harbour but her colleague’s body was found on a nearby beach later that day. A post-mortem exam found that 31-year-old Csaba Orsos died from drowning and not from injuries related to the crash.
The trial heard that the handbrake had been applied before the car entered the water and that the only open window was the driver’s.
Herda moved to appeal her conviction on a number of grounds yesterday, broadly including the issue of recklessness; whether or not the driving into the river was accidental or deliberate; If it was deliberate, whether ‘assault manslaughter’ was still open to the jury: ‘Alleged confessions’ and the judge’s charge to the jury with regard to circumstantial evidence.
Herda’s counsel, senior counsel Giollaíosa Ó Lideadha, said the prosecution ran a case, at least in the beginning, that this was a deliberate, pre-meditated, nasty, nefarious luring of the deceased out for the purpose of an ‘execution’ involving a plan to drive into the river with the window down knowing he could not swim and knowing she could. That was one prosecution theory that seemed to be central to the case, he said.
However, at the end of the case, he said the prosecution appeared to acknowledge perhaps the pre-meditated scenario was ‘far-fetched’. Their case turned to another theory, Mr Ó Lideadha said, that Herda might have just ‘lost the head’ and was trying to commit suicide.
That was a very different type of case and, part of that, was the proposition that Herda effectively ‘confessed’.
Mr Ó Lideadha said there was no evidence at all on Herda’s state of mind or deliberate intent apart from these ‘alleged confessions’. She never said she was driving into the river knowing she was driving into the river, he stated, and there was no suggestion she was attempting to commit suicide.
He said there was a materially important and distinct ‘language issue’ which should have attracted a comment or warning from the trial judge as a matter of fairness.
He said the defence had demonstrated that when Herda answered garda questions, not everything she said was written down or understood. Sometimes the sequence of sentences written down gave the impression of a sequential description she actually
did not give. whether Mr Orsos’s door was ajar when he supposedly left his home.
Phone calls, picking him up and so forth was consistent with an inconsistent posture on her part towards Mr Orsos, Mr Ó Lideadha said.
He asked the court to think about the idea of a person deliberately putting their window down and making a decision to ‘execute somebody’ else by driving through barriers on the basis that she would be able to escape.
He said the circumstantial evidence did not point to murder and the trial judge’s direction that the circumstantial evidence could amount to murder was not founded in law.
Although at times she felt harassed by him, counsel said, Herda did not adopt the position she probably should have adopted – to ‘freeze him out, as it were’ and not have communication with him.
Legally, Mr Ó Lideadha submitted that the trial judge did not correctly charge the jury with regard to whether or not the driving into the river was accidental or deliberate.
He said it was essential for the trial judge to make clear to the jury that presumptions regarding consequences of action could only apply if there was firstly a determination that the action itself was deliberate.
Mr Ó Lideadha said there appeared CONTINUED ON PAGE 23