Lay litigants: Murphy spent 20 years challenging wrong conviction

Occasionally, a lay litigant takes on the system and actually wins. One such case was completed in the Supreme Court last month, involving a farmer from west Cork.

It started with cow dung on the road and ended twenty years later in the Supreme Court. Along the way, Stephen Murphy learned a lot about the state. Principally, he discovered that once the apparatus of the criminal justice system is directed against you it takes major perseverance to pursue justice all the way to resolution.

Stephen Murphy is from Drimoleague in west Cork. He still lives today in the home in which he was reared, but in June 1996 there was major trouble in the area. The Murphy family, Stephen, his father Stephen Snr and sister Anne, were, as they saw it, being seriously put upon. Two years earlier, their neighbours, John McCarthy and his son Dermot, had reclaimed some land which affected a water source for the Murphys.