€29m drugs trial was threatened over garda’s acting role in Love/Hate
Episode on drugs being imported would give jury sense of deja vu, claimed lawyer
A €29m drugs trial was threatened when the defence objected to the potential use as a witness of a detective who acted in Love/Hate.
Detective Kieran O’Reilly – who played a plainclothes detective named Ciarán in the RTÉ drama – had appeared on the prosecution’s list of witnesses in the two-week trial of Nigerian-born Abraham Shodiya.
The defence counsel claimed that the Love/ Hate storyline in which he featured bore a striking resemblance to the case before the court. Blaise O’Carroll SC questioned whether Det. O’Reilly had a role in writing the script and said he feared that jury members who had seen the episode might feel a sense of deja vu.
He said that because of this, he worried about whether his client would get a fair trial.
The defendant had pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possessing the drug for
Lawyer would have sought ban on show
sale or supply in a warehouse and hotel in Dublin on June 26, 2012. He was found guilty last month and was sentenced this week to 10 years in prison.
The Irish Mail on Sunday can now reveal that on October 31, Mr O’Carroll told Judge Desmond Hogan that he had become aware late in the trial of the actor-garda’s inclusion in the book of evidence. The argument was made in the absence of the jury and could not be revealed until after Shodiya was sentenced.
Mr O’Carroll said that although he had been following Love/Hate, he had missed the previous week’s episode. He asked for time to watch the episode on the RTÉ Player website over lunch and promised he would skip the ads.
Judge Hogan agreed to this request. However, Judge Hogan said he was anxious to have legal argument on the matter before the weekend, ‘otherwise we’ll be into another episode’.
After lunch, Mr O’Carroll told the judge he was seeking a discharge of the jury in light of what he saw in the episode, which featured Det. O’Reilly.
The next morning the barrister revealed that, had he known the episode’s content, he would have sought a ban on the programme being broadcast during the trial. He proposed that the episode might have to be played in court.
There were similarities, Mr O’Carroll said, between Det. O’Reilly’s Love/Hate acting role in an ‘elite undercover group targeting criminals’ and his real-life Garda National Drugs Unit role in the €29m cocaine operation.
He said the evidence was that Det. O’Reilly had been undercover at the offices of a shipping company that brought the drugs consignment to Ireland and had taken photos of jailed businessman Gareth Hopkins at the scene.
Mr O’Carroll said that the show’s storyline, involving a surveillance operation, the docks and importing drugs, was very close to the prosecution evidence in the trial.
Prosecution barrister Kerida Naidoo dismissed Mr O’Carroll’s
‘Members of the jury live in the real world’
application as ‘completely unsubstantiated’ and ‘slurred with innuendo’. He said there was no basis in fact that gardaí passed on information to the show’s producers.
He also highlighted that Det. O’Reilly’s evidence in the case had been corroborated by other wit- nesses and as a result the prosecution had decided not to call him.
Mr Naidoo said the defence was suggesting the jury could not distinguish between fact and fiction. Judge Hogan in his ruling agreed with Mr Naidoo. He described the application as ‘tenuous’.
He said: ‘The jury live in the real world and I have little or no doubt that the jury will be able to differentiate what is fiction in the programme and the reality of this trial.’
Referring to the surveillance operation, he said: ‘I see no basis to admonish either the undercover garda or lay blame at his door because the programme is similar to the book of evidence in the general stuff that is going on (in it).’
Shodiya got a 12-year sentence with the final two suspended.