Judge with a taste for the controversial
Six months ago, his no-nonsense approach to the law saw him issue a warrant for the arrest of a Co Kerry garda who failed to appear at the circuit court in Listowel to give evidence in an appeal against a drink-driving conviction.
Non-appearances by gardaí at court hearings are rarely questioned and usually put down to unavoidable absence or a clash of duties, but Judge Moran sent out a clear message that a date with his court is an unmissable obligation.
Last month, at a court in Tralee, the judge went one further and threw out an assault case involving two defendants after five State witnesses failed to appear to give evidence.
Judge Moran did not hide his frustration at the way prosecution cases had been prepared, declaring: “Nothing is ever exactly right here.”
Then, on Monday this week, while sitting in Limerick, he made an order demanding that the governor of Cork Prison appear before him to explain why two inmates from the jail had failed to appear at a court hearing that day.
He gave Governor Sean Quigley a few hours to travel through city traffic from Cork to Limerick. The Governor didn’t need to be asked twice, appearing promptly when the court resumed after lunch.
The Limerick case involved seven defendants charged with offences relating to the family feuds in the city which have become familiar to Judge Moran through a succession of prosecutions for serious assaults, firearms offences and disturbances in recent years.
But as an unassigned judge of the circuit court, he has had a knack for presiding over unusual and high-profile cases.
Bernard Conlon, the first person to be convicted in connection with the epic McBrearty saga in Donegal, heard the bad news from Judge Moran after a jury found him guilty in 2002 of making false statements to gardaí that implicated Frank McBrearty in wrongdoing.
Controversially, Conlon was described in court as mentally retarded, with an IQ of 50, and he gave evidence that he was paid by gardaí to make the false allegations, prompting Judge Moran to remark to the jury that: “You may feel its unfair that the weakest link, to use a contemporary phrase, is prosecuted first.”
The previous year, Judge Moran was involved in another first, convicting a Co Mayo sandwich-maker of using the internet to maliciously defame a business rival by advertising her as a prostitute on a website.
It was an unprecedented prosecution of an offence which was unimaginable until relatively recently and it was a prophetic foretaste of the role the internet would come to play in criminal behaviour.
But it is unlikely Judge Moran ever imagined he would find himself presiding over the trial of one of his own colleagues accused of cyber crime, and still more unlikely that he would find himself throwing the case out due to old-fashioned human error.
He will not have taken the decision to strike out the case lightly. In 1999, he was publicly roasting for suspending two-thirds of the sentence of a former garda sergeant convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing a boy, and he will have appreciated the sensitivities offended by yesterday’s events.
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