Pair jailed for tiger raid found not guilty after ‘dramatic’ ruling

Two men previously jailed for taking part in a 2005 tiger raid have been found not guilty after a “dramatic” ruling that mobile phone records cannot be used as evidence in the case.

Mark Farrelly, aged 43, and Christopher Corcoran, aged 67, were convicted in 2009 of kidnapping cash in transit van driver Paul Richardson and his family during a €2.28m robbery. They were sentenced to 25 years and 12 years respectively.

In 2012 they were freed after the convictions were overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal on foot of a Supreme Court ruling that search warrants used in this and other investigations were unconstitutional. A retrial ended in December 2013 with a hung jury.

Yesterday, Judge Mary Ellen Ring directed the jury to find the men not guilty. They will not face a retrial.

This followed a ruling by Judge Ring on Wednesday on a defence application challenging the admissibility of mobile phone records.

Prosecuting counsel Dominic McGinn SC told the court the ruling had a “dramatic effect” on the case.

The records made up the bulk of the State’s case against the men. They allegedly pointed to a network of nine mobile phones used by a kidnap gang to plan and execute the robbery.

The armed gang burst into the Richardson family home on the night March 13, 2005, and took Marie Richardson and her two teenage sons, Ian, 17, and Kevin, 13, into the Dublin mountains.

They were held there overnight while Mr Richardson was held at gunpoint at his home and told to go to work the next day and deliver the cash to a car park of a pub in the Strawberry Beds, Lucan, south Dublin.

The stolen cash has never been retrieved and Judge Ring noted the events continue to impinge on the family’s life 10 years on.

Corcoran of Bayside Boulevard North, Sutton, and Farrelly of Moatview Court, Priorswood, Coolock, had pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning the Richardsons at Ashcroft, Raheny, on the night of March 13 and 14 and robbery of €2.28m from Mr Richardson and Securicor Security Services Ireland Ltd on March 14, 2005.

The legal argument centred on whether records from mobile phone masts could be relied on to link the phones to the robbery by placing them at relevant times and places.

Mrs Richardson had testified that the gang had allowed her to call her husband from the mountains.

In ruling on the defence application,Judge Ring said none of the three mobile phone network experts called by the prosecution could say the relevant networks were fully operational and functioning on a given day or whether any particular cell sites were out of operation on those relevant dates.

She said there was evidence that calls could be routed through another mast if the nearest mast was not operational at the time or if it was busy.

The defence application relied on the 1992 Cochrane judgment from the UK appeal courts, which held that the prosecution must provide “appropriate authoritative evidence to describe the function and operation of the computer” in the case of records automatically produced by a computer.