Legal system's rot

Despite what some bleating lawyers will tell you, when Majella Holohan took the stand in Ennis last week, she did the state and our legal system a favour. By overstepping what she was supposed to say and asking a series of unanswered questions about the killing of her son, Majella Holohan has at last forced debate on the direction sentencing is taking for serious criminal crime.

I have to admit that, having looked at sentencing on manslaughter cases in the past year and taking into account what the Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA) has had to say on the issue, I was predicting a two- or three-year sentence for Wayne O'Donoghue. I was in a minority of one, but looking at other sentences and how the CCA has reduced them, I had a bad feeling about what Justice Paul Carney felt he could give.

Most other people I spoke to, especially in Cork, felt that on the facts as presented during the trial, a six- or seven-year sentence would be the minimum he would get. As one friend of mine said to me at the time of the trial, anything less would lead to public outrage.

He wasn't far wrong. Four years for taking the life of a child is extraordinarily lenient, even if you believe every single word Wayne O'Donoghue said to gardaí. But these are the types of sentences regularly handed down on appeal by the Court of Criminal Appeal. Most of the cases involve people who are of no interest to journalists and so they don't get much coverage and are not debated publicly.

The exception in terms of coverage of a manslaughter case was that of Padraig Nally, who shot dead a Traveller who was apparently attempting to rob his house. Even then, the six-year sentence he received seems almost unbelievably lenient: his obviously paranoid state of mind didn't seem to play a major role in the verdict in his case. Remember that whatever had gone before, Padraig Nally went into his house, reloaded a gun and then went and shot a man dead when he was trying to get away. That's manslaughter?

That is the way things have gone: life has become very cheap indeed in our courts. In his judgment, Paul Carney told how the Court of Criminal Appeal had instructed that revenge was to play no part at all in sentencing. Why not? What are the criminal courts there for, but to extract revenge and dole out punishment?

But then, in numerous judgments, the country's most senior judges have spoken more about rehabilitation than about punishment. It is almost as if they are totally blind, out of touch and uncaring to the feelings of the society which pays then and expects them to act on their behalf.

Over the years the legal system they have supervised has put the criminal on a pedestal, giving him everything, every benefit of the doubt, every tiny error works in his favour, every chance of acquittal is given to him.

Barristers love this, of course. In most hopeless cases the favoured tactic of barristers seems to me to be to try to collapse the trial. No matter that the reason for the termination might be totally spurious, all on legal aid, the lawyers will just be paid a second time over for the same work when the trial comes around again.

Juries, I'm sorry to say, are not immune from the bullshit that is poured into their ears. Time and again I have seen cases where the scumbag in the dock is so patently guilty of murder that the dogs in the street outside are saying it, yet the jury will only convict of manslaughter. It is almost as if they are so befuddled by the lies, the buffoonery of the barristers and the disallowed evidence, that they are unable to see clearly what is directly in front of their faces.

Most gardaí I have met in cases like these have become totally fatalistic about what is happening. They believe that it is almost impossible to get a murder conviction in anything but the most open and shut cases. Even then, when the guilty will serve only about 12 years for a murder, what's the point? Michael McDowell had promised to increase the time people would serve on a life sentence to 14 years, but nothing has been done.

The four years given to Wayne O'Donoghue are an insult to the Holohan family. It is also pretty insulting to Paul Carney that he, the most experienced criminal jurist in the country, felt that he was hamstrung by the superior courts and couldn't give any more. Even if you believed every single word uttered by Wayne O'Donoghue and the killing was a complete accident, four years is not justice.

The real problem is that no one, except those very close to him, believes O'Donoghue now. There are just too many unanswered questions and once again the legal system is rotten and has failed the people it is there to protect. Unfortunately the rot seems to be most severe at the top.

Fergal Keane is a reporter for RTÉ's Five Seven Live