This morning, the 16th of August, 2060, 69 year old Aaron Brady was released from prison, having served forty years of a life sentence imposed after he had been found guilty in 2020 of the capital murder of a member of An Garda Siochana, Detective Adrian Donohoe. Brady emerged from the front entrance of the prison looking pale but otherwise fit and healthy for a man of his age. Asked by waiting media if he now intended getting on with his life, he frowned, stared into the distance, and said in an almost inaudible whisper, "I have no life left to get on with."
Futuristic but not improbable given the mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years that must be imposed on the Crossmaglen man next October after he was found guilty by a jury in a Dublin court last week. Presuming the tariff is held at 40, as a result of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling he should benefit from 25% remission which would see him released a decade earlier. Hardly a lot to look forward to at this stage of a sentence.
It is a sobering thought, without much in the way of redemption. This is a tough sentence meant to punish rather than rehabilitate. Little in the way of rehabilitation is required to prepare someone to pick up their weekly pension. Whatever message such a sentence is meant to convey, it, at the same time, invites us to ponder the Nietzsche entreaty to "mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
When the trial opened, I followed it as frequently as I could. I remembered the killing of Adrian Donohoe, thinking it a particularly ruthless and brutal act of gratuitous violence. It seemed less a robbery that went wrong than a murder that went right. For the robber armed with a shotgun, there was no intention to do anything other than kill the Garda the moment he alighted from his car.
Initially, when Brady came to trial, the case against him looked very weak. I felt the Prosecution would have serious problems getting it across the line, particularly past a jury which would in all likelihood be less tuned into a state imperative to secure a conviction in a way that a judge would be. Juries have long been a democratic foil against the authoritarian instinct of judges.
As the days grew into weeks and then months I could see the threads of evidence being weaved together into a rope that would eventually become a noose around the neck of the accused. To more than a few people I commented that Brady was goosed. So when the verdict was returned there was no great surprise. It struck me that it was the only verdict that could be returned. Then I began talking to a close friend who is pretty astute when it comes to evidentiary procedures, having faced enough of them himself. Like me, he does not belong to the Society of Angels.
He raised a number of serious concerns about the quality of the evidence, feeling that it fell considerably short of the standards that a charge of capital murder should require: the consequences being so enormous, the bar should be set higher than is the norm. He was making no defence of Aaron Brady, but pointed out the dangers of relying on the binding together of a wide and disparate range of threads, that even when pulled together left many visibly awkward joints, something which caused the prosecutor to comment that on their own each thread amounted to nothing. His attitude seemed to be that the Prosecution case was akin to rebuilding a mirror from all the broken pieces. At the end what do you actually see in it?
Aaron Brady was lying through his teeth. Nobody believes he was loading cubes of diesel waste at the time of the killing. He would hardly require an alibi from his girlfriend of the time for that. But none of his lies or the other circumstantial evidence placed him at the murder scene. He could arguably have been the person who burned the car after the murder rather than being present at the Lordship Credit Union: a solid enough reason for him to seek an alibi.
Fingerprints, DNA or forensics place a person at the scene in a way that circumstantial evidence does not. The circumstantial requires imagining him at the scene rather than actually placing him there. What placed Brady at the scene is other people not at the scene themselves but who claim Brady told them he was there. This dimension of the case would have been much stronger had the US police put a wire on Brady. If he was as loose as is claimed, an admission of culpability would have been forthcoming soon enough. Instead, witnesses whose evidence was either inconsistent or possibly the result of US police inducement, figured heavily in nailing Brady as the shooter. That Brady is such a consummate liar allows for the possibility that he was lying via bragging about his role in the death of Adrian Donohoe in circumstances where he felt free and safe to embellish the tale.
Moreover, if there was enough circumstantial to convict Brady there was an equal amount of it to allow for the inference to be drawn that one of the witnesses had been induced into giving evidence.
Much of the circumstantial pertained to Brady's links to other suspects. The suspects, even if guilty, remain nothing more than suspects for now. That Brady's links to people convicted of nothing can form part of the evidential chain seems dubious.
When the trial opened, I followed it as frequently as I could. I remembered the killing of Adrian Donohoe, thinking it a particularly ruthless and brutal act of gratuitous violence. It seemed less a robbery that went wrong than a murder that went right. For the robber armed with a shotgun, there was no intention to do anything other than kill the Garda the moment he alighted from his car.
Initially, when Brady came to trial, the case against him looked very weak. I felt the Prosecution would have serious problems getting it across the line, particularly past a jury which would in all likelihood be less tuned into a state imperative to secure a conviction in a way that a judge would be. Juries have long been a democratic foil against the authoritarian instinct of judges.
As the days grew into weeks and then months I could see the threads of evidence being weaved together into a rope that would eventually become a noose around the neck of the accused. To more than a few people I commented that Brady was goosed. So when the verdict was returned there was no great surprise. It struck me that it was the only verdict that could be returned. Then I began talking to a close friend who is pretty astute when it comes to evidentiary procedures, having faced enough of them himself. Like me, he does not belong to the Society of Angels.
He raised a number of serious concerns about the quality of the evidence, feeling that it fell considerably short of the standards that a charge of capital murder should require: the consequences being so enormous, the bar should be set higher than is the norm. He was making no defence of Aaron Brady, but pointed out the dangers of relying on the binding together of a wide and disparate range of threads, that even when pulled together left many visibly awkward joints, something which caused the prosecutor to comment that on their own each thread amounted to nothing. His attitude seemed to be that the Prosecution case was akin to rebuilding a mirror from all the broken pieces. At the end what do you actually see in it?
At that point, I came to feel that my own view of proceedings was based on the balance of probability. I remain of the view that Aaron Brady probably did kill Adrian Donohoe. But a conviction in a criminal court rather than a
civil one requires more than the balance of probability. It has to be based on
evidence that must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Probably is not good enough.
Fingerprints, DNA or forensics place a person at the scene in a way that circumstantial evidence does not. The circumstantial requires imagining him at the scene rather than actually placing him there. What placed Brady at the scene is other people not at the scene themselves but who claim Brady told them he was there. This dimension of the case would have been much stronger had the US police put a wire on Brady. If he was as loose as is claimed, an admission of culpability would have been forthcoming soon enough. Instead, witnesses whose evidence was either inconsistent or possibly the result of US police inducement, figured heavily in nailing Brady as the shooter. That Brady is such a consummate liar allows for the possibility that he was lying via bragging about his role in the death of Adrian Donohoe in circumstances where he felt free and safe to embellish the tale.
Moreover, if there was enough circumstantial to convict Brady there was an equal amount of it to allow for the inference to be drawn that one of the witnesses had been induced into giving evidence.
Much of the circumstantial pertained to Brady's links to other suspects. The suspects, even if guilty, remain nothing more than suspects for now. That Brady's links to people convicted of nothing can form part of the evidential chain seems dubious.
The Gardai are no doubt convinced that they got their man. On the balance of probability they did get him. But it is less sure that they got him justly. Justice is not merely a result, it is also a process. As the liberal tenet has it, process justifies outcome. And if the process has been tempered by foul means to secure what is considered a fair outcome ... society gets more vengeance than justice.
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