Dublin man's conviction for violent disorder declared a miscarriage of justice

Declan Tynan is now in a position to sue to State for compensation regarding his wrongful incarceration.

Declan Tynan after he gave evidence in a hearing at the Criminal Courts of Justice on Parkgate Street in Dublin. Picture: Paddy Cummins

A man who spent nearly a year in prison for a crime he did not commit has been declared to have suffered a miscarriage of justice by the Court of Appeal.

The ruling means that 33-year-old Declan Tynan, of Vincent Street Flats, Dublin 8, is in a position to sue to State for compensation regarding his wrongful incarceration.

Mr Tynan had served 11 months of a three-year sentence for violent disorder stemming from a stabbing at a west Dublin bookmakers in 2012 before his conviction was quashed in April 2018 after another man came forward to assume responsibility for the offence.

Mr Tynan had always maintained his innocence.

At the appeal hearing in March of this year, Mr Tynan’s counsel raised the fact that undisclosed communication between the garda investigating the stabbing and the garda who identified Mr Tynan, securing his conviction, amounted to a “scream-aloud issue”, one which meant the Circuit Criminal Court had been “very, very seriously misled”.

Representing Mr Tynan, Michael O’Higgins SC said that his defence had only become aware of that undisclosed communication in November 2021, nine years after the initial crime.

That communication showed that the identifying Garda, Patrick McAvinue, had at first not identified Mr Tynan having been furnished with CCTV stills of the incident by the investigating Garda Ciaran Loughrey in advance of making a formal identification in March 2013.

Gda McAvinue later positively identified Mr Tynan, and testified at the initial 2016 trial that he had no prior knowledge of any of the suspects, nor had he viewed the relevant CCTV stills, prior to making his formal identification.

The three-judge panel, with judgement delivered by Justice Patrick McCarthy, said they accepted that the undisclosed evidence “could and no doubt would have been deployed in cross-examination" by Mr Tynan’s defence and “could have been used to challenge the reliability” of that evidence.

Mr Justice McCarthy said the court would grant Mr Tynan a certificate of miscarriage of justice.

However, the judges dismissed entirely any “suggestion that the gardaí were guilty of any impropriety or suppression of information or anything in the nature of collusion”.

“It is apparent that both gardaí were acting in good faith at all times and they are not open to criticism, even if, in retrospect, a different approach might have been adopted,” they stated in their ruling.

Rather, the judges said that key to establishing Mr Tynan’s innocence was evidence provided by the London Metropolitan Police which reviewed the CCTV footage of the initial crime, and concluded there was “weak support” for the view that the perpetrator had been a man other than Declan Tynan.

They said that that evidence, combined with Mr Tynan’s assertion of his own innocence, the affidavit of the man who claimed to be the actual perpetrator, was enough to satisfy the standards required to declare a miscarriage of justice.

The miscarriage of justice was "not in controversy" in Mr Tynan's case, said Mr Justice McCarthy, who then granted the certificate.