'A most serious, tragic and alarming case'

Adrian Hardiman (pictured), a judge of the Supreme Court, recently delivered the main judgment in an appeal on the issue of damages taken by Donegal nightclub owner, Frank Shortt, arising from his wrongful conviction on drug charges in 1995. Adrian Hardiman had been the presiding judge on the Court of Criminal Appeal in July 2002 when that court deemed Shortt's conviction a miscarriage of justice. In that judgment he had set out in detail the facts in the case, involving concerted perjury on the part of gardaí, very curious conduct on the part of senior gardaí and strange oversights on the part of the prosecuting authorities.

In his judgment on 21 March, 2007, Judge Hardiman repeated some of his observations and again outlined the startling facts in a case involving egregious conduct on the part of An Garda Síochána and otherwise.

Frank Shortt was awarded damages of €4,623,871 against the state.

By Adrian Hardiman, and editied by Vincent Browne.

This is an edited version of Adrian Hardiman's judgment in the Supreme Court on 21 March 2007. The full text of this judgment and of that of the chief justice, John Murray, can be found on the Village website. Also on the website are Adrian Hardiman's judgment in the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2002 and the appendices relevant to the case.

 

 

‘This is a most serious, tragic and alarming case. It has been before the Courts now, in one form or another, for nearly 14 years. Mr Francis Shortt was framed by gardaí on drug offences in 1995, and given a three-year sentence. His life was almost totally ruined and he was reduced to a state of despair. At that nadir of his fortunes he found the strength to reject an offer of early release, on the condition that he dropped his appeal and thereby acknowledged his guilt: the Court has heard no explanation of how, why and on whose authority this offer came to be made to him. He lost his first appeal.

After a long struggle, conducted by dedicated legal advisers, the prosecution quite suddenly, and without any substantive explanation, consented to his conviction being quashed, in November 2000, some years after his release. After another interval of years, in July 2002, he succeeded, after a long hearing, in having the conviction declared a miscarriage of justice: his application for this declaration was opposed with perjured evidence by gardaí.

This is Mr Shortt's appeal from the assessment of damages by the President of the High Court.

On 17 May, 2006, the second and final day of the hearing of this appeal, leading counsel for the defendants Mr Michael Cush SC resumed his submissions with the announcement that he would be saying, as he aptly put it, “something by way of apology to Mr Shortt”. At the conclusion of his submissions he said that he wished to:

“... take the opportunity to say that the state acknowledges that Mr Frank Shortt was the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice. For that and for all his suffering and loss in consequence the state apologises to him unreservedly.”

This apology was tendered some 14 years after the start of the chain of events which led to Mr Shortt being wrongfully convicted of drug offences on the basis of consciously false garda evidence, 11 years after he was sentenced, five-and-a-half years after his conviction was quashed by the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and just under four years after the declaration by the Court of Criminal Appeal that his conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

The apology was both belated and limited in the sense that no apology of any kind was offered until the surprise of the Court at its absence was made clear the previous day. The apology is carefully drafted, does not refer to Mr Shortt's innocence, and does not purport to be offered on behalf of An Garda Síochána. [Mr Shortt] accepted it, in words both dignified and pointed, “in the spirit in which it was offered”.

The reading of this apology was (apart from the judgment of the Court) the last act in an extraordinary 14-year history which saw Mr Shortt, then a 60-year-old chartered accountant and businessman, and the father of five children then aged from 12 to 22, perjured into prison by gardaí. They seem to have borne him no personal ill will: they did it for the purpose of furthering their own careers, and in particular that of their commander and mentor Inspector, later Superintendent, Kevin Lennon. Lennon inspired the perjury and gave it a form and coherence which his principal coadjutor, Detective Garda Noel McMahon, was himself incapable of achieving.

 

 

The setup

On 31 July, 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal gave judgment in Mr Shortt's application to have his conviction deemed a miscarriage of justice. This application was hotly contested by the gardaí most directly involved and required 17 days of oral hearing before the Court of Criminal Appeal. In the judgment of that Court there is set out in very considerable detail the precise working of the conspiracy between certain gardaí to frame Mr Shortt, the subsequent steps taken to prevent this coming to light, and later again to prevent the conviction being deemed a miscarriage of justice.

The Point Inn premises were closed for renovations after the death of Mr Shortt's brother in 1991 and reopened on 18 April, 1992. Almost immediately, it became clear that a problem existed with drug dealing in the premises, in particular the presence of drug dealers from Northern Ireland. This problem was acknowledged both by the gardaí and by Mr Shortt. Eventually it was decided to address this problem by putting undercover gardaí into the premises at weekends over a period of some months. Noel McMahon was always present in an undercover capacity; Garda Tina Fowley was present on all but one such occasion. It was agreed at the trial that the topic of undercover gardaí had been discussed between Mr Shortt and Superintendent Brian Kenny. Mr Shortt said he was aware from this discussion that there would be undercover gardaí in the premises whereas Superintendent Kenny, agreeing that the matter had been discussed, said that he had not committed himself on this point. As will be seen, Mr Shortt's account of this matter received some unexpected support long after the trial.

Subsequent to a major raid on the premises in August 1992, the gardaí charged Mr Shortt with multiple charges of permitting his premises to be used for the sale of drugs on that and other occasions. Despite the large number of charges, when the case came to the District Court there was (according to Noel McMahon, one of the gardaí centrally involved in this scandal) a “semi-deal” available to Mr Shortt whereby he would be allowed to plead guilty to one charge and the matter would be dealt with by way of a fine. Mr Shortt did not avail of this offer. It was then decided to have the matter dealt with on indictment in the Circuit Court.

Mr Shortt at all times protested his innocence of the charges in question. When a Book of Evidence was eventually produced it turned out that the case against him was very weak indeed, almost non-existent: on the hearing before the Court of Criminal Appeal, counsel for the state conceded that there was then insufficient evidence to put Mr Shortt on trial “on the statements”.

 

 

Involvement of barristers

A  vital development then occurred. Papers were sent to counsel to advise Proofs (this is a procedure adopted in most legal cases whereby one of the barristers involved in a case states what evidence is required to prove the case in question). Before a written advice was drafted, there was a lengthy meeting between state counsel and various gardaí in the Lake of Shadows Hotel near Buncranna.

When counsel's Advice of Proofs was received, it pointed to the fact that the evidence in the garda statements was grossly inadequate to support the charges. As counsel said, the evidence available from the garda statements clearly established that drug dealing was taking place on the premises but it did not establish that Mr Shortt was in any way involved in or tolerant of this. Portions of the evidence, indeed, were open to the construction that he was not aware of it. In so advising, counsel was doing no more than her duty to her client, the Director of Public Prosecutions.

 

 

Inventing evidence

This Advice of Proofs came to hand in September, 1994. It presented the gardaí with an acute dilemma: a trial date had been fixed for October, 1994, and here was state counsel telling them that, on the Book of Evidence, they had no case. Certain gardaí then engaged in a conspiracy to transform a very weak case into a very strong one by inventing evidence. This was done cleverly and cold bloodedly.

The result of this conspiracy can be seen very easily, simply by comparing the original statements of Garda Noel McMahon and Garda Tina Fowley with their subsequent statements, served as additional evidence. The judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal contains a tabular summary tracing the changes in the Garda account contained in the original contemporary notes (concealed at the trial) through the initial statements to their eventual additional evidence. It is noteworthy that the statements of McMahon and of Fowley were altered in a very similar way.

This, however, was not easily done. Although one would have thought it perfectly plain from the Advice of Proofs what the shortcomings in (Noel) McMahon's evidence were, he found it difficult to come up with a new statement which would support the prosecution case. Accordingly, he brought his statement to a meeting with (Superintendent Kevin) Lennon in a garda station. Lennon took the statement and, in his own handwriting, indicated the necessary alterations. Some of his instructions are in unambiguous terms such as “Where is Shortt – say he was nearby”.

Even with this fools guide, in Lennon's handwriting on McMahon's statement, the latter had serious difficulty in producing an acceptable version to be served as additional evidence. His eventual statement of additional evidence was produced not in a garda station but at a meeting in his own home attended by himself, Garda Fowley, another guard who did the typing and, for part of the time Inspector Lennon. He was called to the meeting because of a grave and unexpected difficulty which had arisen.

The gardaí had told state counsel when they met her that on each occasion they were present undercover in the Point Inn the water supply had been turned off. The effect of this was to force customers, if they wanted water, to buy it from the bar. It is a recognised effect of the consumption of “speed” that it makes the consumer extremely thirsty. McMahon's statement had several references to seeing large quantities of glasses of tap water being sold over the bar. The problem which arose was that in the statement of Garda Tina Fowley she described following a girl in to the ladies toilet and seeing her splitting a white tablet. The girl then “put one half into her mouth and washed it down with a drink of water from the wash basin”. If this was so then the detailed allegation the gardaí made to state counsel, recorded in the Advice of Proofs, was false.

Arising from the inconsistency between this statement and the allegation to counsel that the water had always been turned off, it was decided simply not to pursue the latter allegation any further than they already had. This was done even though it had featured quite heavily in Lennon's original plan: on the first page of McMahon's statement he had written “You have to say that you drank numerous half pints of water from the [illegible] section of the bar. Who was filling the glasses of water from behind the bar etc.”

 

 

Perjury and conviction

The case then proceeded with McMahon and Fowley giving evidence in accordance with their new statements. The importance of their evidence is undisputed: the trial judge in the Circuit Court (Judge Buchanan) described McMahon's evidence as the nub of the prosecution case, and so it was. McMahon was naturally cross-examined on how his first statement, which revealed no case at all against Mr Shortt, had mutated into a second, which revealed a strong one. He claimed that the new version was the unaided product of his own memory. Asked what materials he used in writing his second statement he perjured himself by concealing the existence of his original notes which did not at all incriminate Mr Shortt.

Mr Shortt was then convicted and sentenced to three years' imprisonment. His conviction related to 13 only of the counts against him: the rest were held over. Later, when he was offered early release if he dropped his appeal, a further inducement held out to him was that these additional counts would be dropped. He was at that stage in fear that they would be proceeded with and he would receive a longer sentence.

It must be emphasised that the foregoing is the barest summary of the main findings of the Court of Criminal Appeal in relation to the framing of Mr Shortt. There was also evidence that McMahon arranged with a woman who was an established garda informant (Adrienne McGlinchey) to attend on the night of the raid in August, 1992, and plant drugs on the premises. In fact, she got drunk and did not turn up. Furthermore, McMahon alleged that he had bought drugs from a named person using marked sterling currency. This person was then arrested but the currency could not be found in the property store in Buncranna Garda Station when inquiries were later made, and it turned out that the custody record in relation to the person had been torn out of a bound book at the garda station. This, of course, would have shown what property he had on him on arrival there. Despite the allegation of widespread drug dealing, no person appears to have been convicted of such an offence in relation to the evening of the raid.

 

Consequences to Frank Shortt

The consequences of these things to Mr Francis (Frank) Shortt, were nothing less than life blighting. He suffered imprisonment for three years, less only statutory remission, his business and his reputation were ruined, his health suffered and his private and family life were severely affected. He was driven into a state of despair and for a period endured a dark night of the soul. His premises were burnt down by the IRA. He suffered intense feelings of shame and powerlessness, aggravated by his school-going children being pilloried as the children of a drug dealer and by his wife, whom he had always supported appropriately, being compelled to apply for a social welfare allowance for the wives of prisoners.

When, having served the sentence and suffered all the other consequences, he endeavoured to have his conviction declared a miscarriage of justice, he was opposed with further perjured evidence by members of An Garda Síochána, including the Superintendent. While the direct cause of these grotesque injustices was a conspiracy between a small number of members of An Garda Síochána, the attitude of the garda and prosecuting authorities was, to say the least of it, a grudging and insensitive one as will be seen.

 

 

Curious anomalies

But there are significant aspects of the case which are still unexplained. These include:

•1. How it came about that Mr Shortt was returned for trial on serious criminal charges, at the suit of the Director of Public Prosecutions, even though it was conceded in the Court of Criminal Appeal that there was then no sufficient case against him on the documents which had been produced;

•2. How, despite this state of affairs, Mr Short was offered a “semi-deal” whereby the bulk of the charges would be dropped if he pleaded guilty to a single charge, with only minor consequences;

•3. How no alarm bells were set ringing by the sudden transformation of a very weak case into a very strong one by new statements from two members of An Garda Síochána containing material which they had inexplicably said nothing about until shortly before a trial date was fixed;

•4. How, while unjustly imprisoned, Mr Shortt was offered various benefits, including early release, if he would drop his appeal;

•5. How a very important allegation of an admission of perjury by one of the gardaí involved, from a credible source, apparently escaped the attention of senior gardaí and prosecuting authorities for a considerable time. They did nothing about it. But the DPP, while unaware of this important evidence, nonetheless consented to the conviction being quashed, for reasons yet to emerge.

 

 

Motives

Not the least alarming aspect of the case, touched on above, is that Mr Shortt was framed by gardaí who, on all the evidence, bore him at first no personal ill, will simply in pursuit of an unscrupulous scheme to advance their careers, and in particular that of Superintendent Kevin Lennon. It was he who orchestrated the conspiracy to make a false case against Mr Shortt and he had as his willing coadjutor Detective Garda Noel McMahon and perhaps another member.

Each of the relevant gardaí was absolutely indifferent to the commission of perjury. McMahon, almost incredibly, at one point during his evidence in the Court of Criminal Appeal blamed, not himself or his superior, but Mr Shortt's original legal advisers for the sentence which he received:
“I might have expressed the fact that it is a shame a man of his age put himself in a position or was put in that position by his legal team to serve time when it could have been resolved at District Court level.”

On the face of it, Mr Shortt would have appeared an unpromising candidate for the sort of set-up of which he was the victim. He was a 60-year-old family man, a professionally qualified accountant, a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, and a well-known businessman in the North Donegal area. Yet he was successfully framed, with all the consequences set out above. It is also noteworthy that a witness told the Court of Criminal Appeal, with retrospective incredulity, that Lennon was spoken of in Donegal Garda circles as a possible future Commissioner of An Garda Síochána.

 

 

Admission of perjury drops of sight

Another major theme in the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal was the evidence of Mrs Sheenagh McMahon. A very significant part of her evidence related to admissions to perjury made to her by (her former husband) Detective Garda McMahon. This evidence is important for three quite separate reasons.

In evidence to the Court of Criminal Appeal Mrs McMahon said that Detective Garda McMahon was “upset in front of me about Mr Shortt, his conviction, he didn't think that Mr Shortt was going to get three years... I don't think that he was upset about the fact he was convicted, but he was definitely upset at the fact that he was put in jail for three years... he said he didn't expect him to get three years.”

She also said that Detective Garda McMahon had said “... that it was his evidence that convicted Francis Shortt and without his evidence Francis Shortt wouldn't have went to jail” (sic). She was asked whether the Detective Garda had said anything else, whereupon she paused and said “He told me that he had perjured himself in court... and that he had done it for Kevin Lennon to help him get promotion.”

This was clearly very significant evidence. The Court of Criminal Appeal was, however, constrained to treat it with great caution because the witness was the estranged wife of the Detective Garda and she appeared to be giving this account for the first time in the Court of Criminal Appeal, although she had been extensively interviewed by Gardaí as part of Assistant Commissioner (Kevin) Carty's Inquiry (this was the inquiry instigated by the then garda commissioner, into allegations by the McBrearty family of ill-treatment by gardaí in Donegal).

She was questioned about this both by counsel and by the Court. She stoutly denied that she was saying it for the first time and maintained in the face of scepticism from counsel and the Court that she had given the same information to the Carty Inquiry. The Court, and the parties to the miscarriage of justice application had been given what was represented to be all the relevant papers from this Inquiry (conducted by Assistant Commissioner Carty) and there was no mention, direct or indirect, of this very significant allegation being made by Mrs McMahon. But she appeared absolutely certain in court that she had made this allegation to Carty. The Court specifically asked counsel for the (DPP):

“The question is now a very simple one: is there in any shape or form a signed or unsigned note of a mention of perjury by Mr McMahon?”

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, who was fully alive to the importance of the matter replied:

“Not in any material we have from the Carty Inquiry...”

The Court then asked:

“... Is there in any shape or form in any garda document a note of this lady mentioning the term ‘perjury' or words to that effect?”

Counsel replied:

“Certainly not that I have or that I am aware of...”

Most unfortunately and embarrassingly, it transpired that counsel's instructions were grossly deficient. Later in the day a separate memorandum of an interview with Mrs McMahon was found and, in the words of counsel for the state:

“It does mention – what the witness says is correct.”

It transpired, precisely as Mrs McMahon had said, the garda officers conducting the Inquiry had indeed decided that the allegation of perjury and cognate matters should be put into a separate document. The consequences of this for the present case are indeed very great. What she said was recorded in a separate memorandum of interview of 15 September, 2000; as follows:

“Sheenagh McMahon then spoke about the Frank Shortt case. She stated that her husband had told her that Tina Fowley nearly ruined the case in court. Noel told her that he had committed perjury in the Court. She stated Kevin Lennon put Noel up to telling lies in the case. Sheenagh said that Tina Fowley could fill us in more on this matter. Noel told her that Frank Shortt did not deserve the sentence that he had received. She said that Frank Shortt had gone to Superintendent Brian Kenny in Buncranna and had requested him to put gardaí into the Point Inn in order to clear the place of drugs.”

The last sentence above precisely mirrors what Mr Shortt said in his own defence at the trial. But it was contradicted by Garda evidence at the trial.
There is then a sentence which is difficult to believe that anyone concerned about policing matters in Donegal could have forgotten:
“Sheenagh McMahon stated that it was probably because of the false evidence given in the Frank Shortt that Tina Fowley blew the whistle on the McBrearty case.”

Three observations require to be made about this evidence.

If it is reliable, and the Court of Criminal Appeal has found that it was, it is evidence of an absolutely unique kind: an admission by a Detective Garda of premeditated perjury in an important criminal case.

Secondly, Mrs McMahon's credibility was greatly boosted by the fact that her account of having told the Carty Inquiry about the admission of perjury, and her persistence in this account in the face of manifest scepticism from the Court and from counsel for the authorities, was vindicated by the sudden production of the memorandum.

It must have appeared to Mrs McMahon that the authorities had deliberately decided to “bury” her account of September, 2000, and to deny that she had ever said anything of the sort. But she did not waiver in her account.

Thirdly, while the Court of Criminal Appeal found that neither the garda authorities nor the Director of Public Prosecutions had deliberately concealed the memorandum, the fact that it was forgotten about and never acted upon is gravely disturbing. It should be said that Mrs McMahon gave the account set out above to the gardaí only two months before the Director of Public Prosecutions consented to Mr Shortt's conviction being quashed.

Nevertheless, counsel for the (DPP) told the Court of Criminal Appeal that her account had not influenced the Director's decision because, though he had received the memorandum, he had not read it at the time he took the decision to consent to the conviction being quashed. This, in turn, means that the (DPP) had formed the view that the conviction was unsafe or unsatisfactory on grounds unrelated to the Detective Garda's confession to perjury. The Court has no idea what these grounds were.

Apart from that, it is very surprising, to say the least, that so dramatic an allegation was not followed up. It was the gardaí who insisted that Mrs McMahon's account of the admission to perjury should not form part of her main statement but be separately recorded. This, presumably, was because of its sensitivity. But it had the consequence that the perjury allegation simply dropped out of sight. It did not form part of her principal statement, or of the edited version of that statement which was given to the Court and to Mr Shortt's advisers. It must surely have been communicated to the very highest levels of An Garda Síochána but nothing was done about it.

So thoroughly did this vital piece of information drop out of sight that solicitor and counsel for the authorities, at a hearing specifically directed to the question of whether Mr Shortt's conviction was a miscarriage of justice, were never told about it by the gardaí. These professional advisers were thus placed in a position of very great embarrassment without any fault on their part. It is only fair to add that, after this catastrophe, solicitor and counsel for the authorities placed the whole product of the Carty Inquiry before the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The Court can only regard the circumstances whereby Mrs McMahon's allegation simply dropped out of sight as indicative of grave insensitivity on the part of the authorities, an inexplicable failure to investigate the most relevant and serious allegation and a reluctance to contemplate the appalling prospect that Mr Shortt had indeed been the victim of a campaign of perjury by gardaí. Even when the documentary evidence mentioned below came to light, the alleged confession to perjury remained uninvestigated.

 

 

Chance and coincidence

Attention must be drawn to the large element of chance and coincidence involved in the eventual vindication of Mr Shortt. One of the gardaí involved, McMahon, was a man who drank to gross excess and when drunk and maudlin confessed his perjury to two of the witnesses who gave evidence in the Court of Criminal Appeal. Secondly, McMahon's drinking problem, in the years following the Shortt case, made him into a “loose canon” from the point of view of his colleagues and superiors.

There was, for example, a serious incident where he pointed a gun at another guard. But of more relevance to the present case was the fact that, according to Superintendent Lennon himself, a sergeant in the Donegal Division, Sergeant Leheny, expressly threatened to destroy Lennon's career on the basis of information which he claimed McMahon would supply when drunk. This extraordinary fact led to the creation of certain contemporary documents.

Thirdly, there was something of a falling out between McMahon and Lennon over an apparently trivial cause: Lennon successfully nominated himself for a divisional policing award wholly or mainly on the basis of the Shortt case: and McMahon bitterly resented this as he felt he should have had the award himself.

Fourthly, the ill-feeling engendered by this dispute led Lennon to think that McMahon might make allegations against him and caused him to get McMahon to write a remarkable “letter of satisfaction” which is fully discussed in the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The same dispute and its consequences led McMahon to keep certain documents of a highly incriminating nature which he might otherwise have destroyed, including one clearly showing Lennon's role in procuring the alteration of the garda evidence prior to the trial. McMahon kept this material because, in his own words used in a handwritten aide memoire to himself, he was afraid that “Lennon [was] shafting me”.

 

 

Commentary by Vincent BrowneAnother major scandal deserving inquiry

This is not just another instance of corruption, perjury and criminality by “bad apples” within An Garda Síochána. It reaches into the higher echelons of An Garda Síochána, into the state prosecutorial service, into the prison service and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

On 3 August 1992, a half hour after midnight, 60 gardaí charged into Frank Shortt's disco, at the Point Inn, Quigley's Point, Co Donegal. They were on a drugs raid. They searched several in the crowded club but found nothing. But two weeks later Frank Shortt was charged with knowingly allowing drugs to be sold on his premises (this was all “got-up” to advance the career of one of the two gardaí at the centre of this scandal, Kevin Lennon).
From the outset it was an extraordinary charge, for Frank Shortt himself had instigated Garda surveillance of his nightclub to prevent the sale of drugs there but nobody thought there was anything odd about it.

In February 1993 there was another raid this time involving 100 gardaí. This time they found some tablets.

Surprisingly, when the case came for trial Frank Shortt was offered a deal: if he pleaded guilty to a single charge in the District Court, the other 31 charges against him would be dropped and he would get a small fine. He refused. The case was listed for trial at the Circuit Court.

When the Book of Evidence became available, the barrister acting for the prosecution pointed out the evidence against Frank Shortt was very weak. Whereas there was evidence that drugs had been sold on the premises, there was no evidence that Frank Shortt knew about it.

Gardaí then set about concocting evidence to show Frank Shortt knew about drugs being sold at his premises. They then gave perjured evidence. Frank Shortt was sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

The recent judgement of the chief justice, John Murray, described what happened to him.

“For the second night and the following 12 weeks he had a cell to himself. This cell was in the old prison and measured 10' x 7'. It was in disrepair. It had one window high up. The floor was of lino badly burnt and unclean. His bed had a thin horse hair mattress. There was a stench. The cell was infested with mice and cockroaches. There were no washing or toilet facilities. The toilet was a small aluminium soup pot. He was confined to the cell for 17 hours each day. He had to slop out each day in the toilet area the floor of which was generally covered with urine, excreta and vomit.”
During the course of his imprisonment he was offered early release if he dropped his appeal against conviction.

Meanwhile, the then wife of one of the gardaí involved, Sheenagh MacMahon, told the inquiry into Garda scandal in Donegal, led by Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty, that her husband, Noel MacMahon, had confessed to perjury in the case. But, amazingly, nothing was done, but not only that, the note of this interview seems to have been suppressed. When the appeal came, the gardaí fought it tooth and nail in spite of the obvious bizarre elements to the case. So too did the prosecution service.

This is a case deserving further urgent enquiry into the conduct of the senior gardaí and the handling of the case by the prosecution service.