Peer escaped booby-trap bomb
IN 1984, one day before taking up his appointment as a High Court judge in Northern Ireland, Lord Carswell spotted an IRA bomb planted underneath his car. It was subsequently defused.
The assassination attempt did not deter him from presiding over the Diplock trials in the country.
Juries did not sit because of justified fears that they would be intimidated by paramilitaries, so judges were needed to determine guilt or innocence by themselves.
In one interview Carswell said the system was “testing and tiring” as judges, unlike juries, had no one to discuss case details with.
Inevitably, the high-profile cases brought before him caused controversy, notably that of three men accused of being involved in the 1988 murders of off-duty soldiers who had accidentally got caught up in the funeral of a leading IRA figure.
They were beaten and shot in the head in a garage.Two men were found guilty of murder.Although three others were not directly involved in the murder, two of them had kicked the soldiers at the start of the violence.The trio were found guilty by Carswell, although one had his conviction quashed in 1997.
Campaigners tried to use the case to end the Diplock system.
And the judge was at the centre of further controversy over terrorist cases heavily reliant on the evidence of so-called “supergrasses”.
Born Robert Douglas Carswell, he was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Pembroke College, Oxford and the University of Chicago Law School.
He was Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2004, and spent 20 years presiding over the Diplock trials
Archbishop McDowell of the Church of Ireland said: “Lord Carswell made a significant contribution to the administration of justice in Northern Ireland, during what were often difficult and extremely dangerous times.”
He died peacefully at home and is survived by wife Romayne and children Catherine and Patricia.