Prosecutors tried to use 1957 assault against dying Troubles veteran
PROSECUTORS attempted to introduce “bad character” evidence against Dennis Hutchings even as the 80-year-old Troubles veteran lay dying of Covid.
Lawyers for Mr Hutchings, who died on Monday night while on trial over a fatal shooting during his time in Northern Ireland, expressed their outrage at an attempt to damage his reputation when he was clearly so seriously ill.
Yesterday campaigners called for a “Dennis’s law” to end the so-called witch-hunt of veterans and prevent them being dragged through the courts over deaths during the Troubles.
The Northern Irish prosecution service had wanted a conviction against Mr Hutchings for assault in 1957 – 64 years ago, when he was a teenager – to be used as evidence against him.
Prosecutors knew he had contracted Covid because the trial had been suspended for three weeks in the hope he would recover. As Mr Hutchings lay in his hotel room hours before his death in hospital, prosecutors made the application to the judge at Belfast Crown Court for the conviction to be admitted.
Philip Barden, a partner at Devonshires law firm, who represented Mr Hutchings, said: “It is spiteful and vexatious that at the time he was dying in his hotel room they decided to do this. They are not interested in justice; they are only interested in revenge.
“While Dennis was ill with Covid in his hotel room, the prosecution made an application to adduce before a judge that he had been convicted of assault in 1957 for which he got fined £2 as evidence of bad character.”
Mr Barden, who called the ambulance, kept the information from the dying man so as not to upset him. “He knew he wasn’t coming back from hospital,” he said. “I could see it in his eyes.”
Mr Hutchings, a great-grandfather, died alone in hospital without his family around him. Kim, his grieving partner, had flown to their home in Cornwall, “never thinking he wouldn’t survive”, Mr Barden said. She asked him to make sure the veteran’s medals, which he wore in court, were safe. She was too upset to comment yesterday. Mr Hutchings, a corporal major in the Life Guards regiment, was cleared of any wrongdoing over the death of John Patrick Cunningham, a 27-year-old man with learning difficulties, after the shooting in 1974. The authorities began reinvestigating the death in 2011 and he was arrested in 2015 and charged with attempted murder.
He always protested his innocence, insisting he fired warning shots over the head of Cunningham to get him to stop as he ran from troops in a field in Co Armagh. He said another soldier, who has since died, had confessed to firing the fatal shots and the defence team had planned to introduce evidence of “several” witnesses to back that up.
The death of Mr Hutchings is deeply embarrassing for Boris Johnson, who had previously pledged to end the prosecution of NI veterans. It follows the collapse of an earlier trial against two soldiers, known only as A and C, who had been charged with murdering an Official IRA gunman and commander.
Downing Street admitted yesterday that the “tragic” case illustrated the problems of pursuing historical allegations through the courts and said it wanted to press ahead with legislation to introduce a statute of limitations to stop veterans being charged.
The Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland declined to comment on its decision to make the court application to introduce Mr Hutchings’s 1957 conviction. It said “the decision to prosecute Mr Hutchings for attempted murder was taken after an impartial and independent application of the Test for Prosecution”. Michael Agnew, the deputy director of public prosecutions, said: “In the course of the proceedings there were rulings by High Court judges that the evidence was sufficient to put Mr Hutchings on trial and also that the proceedings were not an abuse of process.”
Investigations into allegations of abuse by British soldiers in Iraq have closed without any prosecutions, the Defence Secretary said yesterday. Ben Wallace told the Commons in a written statement that the Service Police Legacy Investigations had assessed 1,291 allegations since July 2017 but had now “officially closed its doors”.
‘It is spiteful and vexatious that at the time he was dying in his hotel room they decided to do this’