Man fails to have harassment conviction overturned

A man who received a five-year sentence for harassing his former girlfriend has had an attempt to overturn his conviction rejected by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Seamus Quirke (aged 45) was sentenced to five years in prison with three years suspended by Judge Patrick Moran in October last year, having denied harassment of teacher Grainne Barry on various dates between 2005 and 2008.

A jury found Quirke, who originally hails from Ballyduff in Co Waterford, guilty on all four charges of harassment, but acquitted him on a charge of criminal damage, after just two hours of deliberations following a trial in July 2009.

The CCA, of Mr Justice Joseph Finnegan presiding, sitting with Mr Justice Michael Hanna and Mr Justice Declan Budd, found that each of the eight grounds of appeal submitted to the court were without foundation in law and accordingly refused leave to appeal.

Counsel for the applicant, Mr Seamus Roche BL, had told the court that the “slew of allegations” against Quirke amounted to a complex, atypical case which was difficult to disprove given the number of individual incidents detailed within each charge of harassment.

Surmising eight written submissions before the court, Mr Roche said that the trial judge had erred in failing to remind the jury to apply the standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” to each of the 25 individual episodes of harassment alleged to have occurred.

Mr Roche said that without such a warning jury may have been at risk of regarding one charge as corroborative to another.

He told the court that there was a potential for an “injustice” in the conviction as “an accident in drafting” the indictment left Quirke answering four distinct charges of harassment rather than a single charge of harassment over four years.

He contended that his client was placed in the difficult position of having to look back and account for his whereabouts and actions in isolated pockets of time as long as four year ago.

He said that persistence was an essential aspect of a charge of harassment and it was questionable whether the charges as laid out in the indictment could reflect such persistent behaviour.

Mr Roche said the jury could have also seen photographs of Quirke and his house published in the Irish Examiner which were potentially prejudicial to the trial.

He said that the judge may have also influenced the jury by remarking that Ms Barry was “a young and impressionable girl” when she wrote a series of effusive letters to Quirke during a period when she alleged their relationship was in difficulty.

Mr Roche acknowledged that the judge had addressed the issue in his response to a requisition but said that “the genie was out of the bottle” as soon as the judge had expressed his view.

Counsel for the State, Mr Donal McCarthy SC, said that simply because a case was unusual or complex did not require a judge to issue any warning or take any action beyond directing a jury in the appropriate manner.

Mr McCarthy told the court that the judge had adequately dealt with the importance of each specific alleged event of harassment in his charge to the jury.

He said that it would have been unfair to present the accused with one charge covering a huge amount of events over four years and that “it was no accident” the indictment was drafted to reflect three and four month time-periods where harassment was alleged to have occurred.

Mr McCarthy told the court that the judge had told the jury to disregard anything they had seen or read in a newspaper and in a response to a requisition had told them that they could interpret letters written by the complainant to Quirke as evidence against her if they so wished.