Quirke has second chance to appeal life sentence for murder of Mr Moonlight
KILLER Patrick Quirke has been given a second chance to overturn the life sentence he received for the murder of his love rival.
The Supreme Court has granted permission to Quirke, 51, to challenge the Court of Appeal’s decision not to quash his 2019 conviction, or grant him a new trial.
The Court of Appeal believed there was nothing in the way Quirke’s trial had been run which caused them any doubt over its safety or fairness.
However, the Supreme Court has now stated there are two matters of public importance which justify a further appeal.
These concern the validity of a search warrant and the choice of witnesses called at trial by the prosecution.
In the determination, Supreme Court judges Elizabeth Dunne, Séamus Woulfe and Gerard Hogan said: ‘These issues may arise in other criminal trials in the future, and it would be in the public interest to obtain further clarity’.
In the meantime, Quirke will remain behind bars at Portlaoise Prison in Co. Laois.
Following a 71-day trial in May 2019, the dairy farmer, from Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary, was convicted of killing Bobby Ryan, a father-of-two and part-time DJ known as ‘Mr Moonlight’.
A search had been launched after Mr Ryan, 52, failed to turn up for work on the morning of June 3, 2011, after spending the night at his girlfriend Mary Lowry’s home in Fawnagown, Co. Tipperary.
His body was not discovered until April 2013, when it was found in a water tank on Ms Lowry’s farm, which Quirke had been renting. The prosecution alleged Quirke carried out the murder so he could rekindle a former love affair with Ms Lowry, having been left broken-hearted when she ended the relationship with him to go out with Mr Ryan.
It was claimed that he then staged the finding of the badly decomposed body, shortly before his lease on the farm was due to be terminated.
Court of Appeal judge George Birmingham had noted that it was an unusual case, as the prosecution could not say precisely how the deceased met his death, could not put a weapon in the hands of the suspect or point with evidence to a time of death.
There were no direct admissions by Quirke, although answers he gave during interviews were damaging from a defence perspective, the court heard. His defence team had argued in his initial appeal that, in a circumstantial evidence case, it was impossible to ‘unscramble the egg’ if a strand of evidence was allowed to go to the jury that should not have done.
In the Supreme Court application, Quirke’s defence team argued that the search warrant was invalid due to a specific failure on the part of gardaí to inform the District Court judge about an intention to seize computers that contained the personal data of an entire family.
They said this had bypassed both judicial scrutiny and safeguards against unlawful breaches of constitutional rights.
The jury had been told that a search of a seized computer had revealed an internet search for ‘A human corpse post-mortem: the stages of decomposition’, as well as an article entitled ‘How DNA works’. The dispute over witnesses focused on a disagreement between pathologists as to whether the blunt-force trauma which killed Mr Ryan had been caused by the impact from a vehicle, or not.
At the trial, the defence wanted all of the pathologists to give evidence for the prosecution, so that they could then be crossexamined by the defence.
However, the prosecution said that it would not call the evidence from the State pathologist witnesses, which supported the vehicle theory.
Dr Michael Curtis, from the State pathologist’s team, was then called by the defence, but it
‘Issues may arise in other trials’
Granted leave on two points
argued that this put it at a disadvantage when it came to questioning, and allowed the prosecution to explore some theories with no real evidential basis.
The Supreme Court ruled that it was important to identify what might be searched for when applying for a search warrant.
The court said it was also important to analyse the discretion the DPP has in terms of which witnesses to call, particularly if those are expert witnesses.
It therefore granted leave to appeal on those two points.