| Wicklow People | Date: 20th March 2003 | staff reporter |
CATHERINE NEVIN will spend at least another six years in Mountjoy Prison for the murder of her husband, Jack White's publican Tom Nevin, after her final avenue of appeal was closed last week. Nevin's last hope of overturning her life sentence for murder was shattered on Friday when the supreme court refused to grant her leave to appeal her conviction.
With three years of her sentence already served, it seems unlikely that Mrs Nevin will be out of jail before 2009 at the earliest.
And she faces the prospect of further court action in a bid to retain any share of her husband's estate, as Tom Nevin's family seek to have the courts rule she should not benefit from the murder.
The end of Catherine Nevin's appeal came swiftly: it took Mr Justice Geoghegan just five minutes to declare that all grounds for leave to appeal had been utterly rejected and hand over the 60-page judgement to her legal team.
The speed with which the appeal process was conducted was in stark contrast to Nevin's murder trial, which concluded on April 11 2000 after five months, three trials, and the longest consideration by a jury in Irish legal history.
In the event, the Supreme Court ruled that murder trial Judge Mella Carroll had handled a difficult trial in a careful and correct manner to ensure that Catherine Nevin received a fair trial. 'This court cannot but be impressed by the calm and resolute way the trial judge conducted the trial from start to finish. By the same token, this court cannot but be impressed by the length of time the jury took in arriving at their verdicts. The transcript [of the trial] at every turn gives the impression of a fair and orderly trial,' said Mr Justice Geoghegan.
Catherine Nevin had argued that she had not received a fair trial on three separate grounds. Ultimately, the Supreme Court failed to hold with her on any of the issues and rejected her application for leave to appeal.
The Supreme Court judges observed that Judge Carroll took explicit steps to ensure that the jurors who were empanelled for the trial were not prejudiced as a result of the publicity.
NEVIN'S APPEAL GROUNDS
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They said that while the gardaí were entitled to give certain levels of information about the progress of an investigation to the press, there was no indication of a systematic leaking in this instance and that Judge Carroll was entitled to exercise her discretion in not compelling journalists to identify their sources if she felt this was not relevant.
The supreme court ruling dealt succinctly with the issue of whether Judge Mella Carroll had fairly summarised the evidence in the case: 'The court is of the view that all the evidence, both prosecution and defence, was fairly reviewed by the learned trial judge and it rejects the submission that she was obliged to summarise all the arguments put to the jury in the closing speech...as to the circumstantial evidence.'
The Supreme Court judges examined each of the special branch files of which the defence team had sought disclosure and found that there was nothing in them that could have been of assistance to the defence case.
The supreme court judges said that Judge Carroll correctly held that the evidence in respect of the solicitation charges was admissible in the murder trial and that her directions to the jury were sufficiently careful, clear, complete, and unambiguous to fully protect Mrs Nevin's interests and her capacity to defend herself.
AT NO time since her conviction has Catherine Nevin sought a meeting with gardaí in an effort to provide them with evidence that could identify her husband's murderer.
As she languishes behind bars with no prospect of release, senior gardaí involved in the investigation say that they would love to hear from the woman who coolly plotted her husband's violent death over a period of years.
However, exactly seven years after the murder, the senior policeman who investigated the killing says that he still hopes advances in forensic science may lead gardaí to the person who actually shot Tom Nevin in cold blood.
'I was working on the investigation into who pulled the trigger just this week,' said Detective Sergeant Fergus O'Brien, who was one of the first gardaí to arrive at the murder scene.
'With developments in investigation techniques you can never know what will come up in 10 years time and this case has to be ready to go. The case is far from closed.' Sgt O'Brien said that he was pleased at the Supreme Court ruling, which marked the culmination of a long and complex investigation.
'I'm pleased that it's over and pleased for everyone who was involved in the investigation and for the Nevin family'
'There has been no investigation like it in the history of the State and we did as good a job as we could have done. The whole thing was a very long and difficult process for everyone involved,' he said.
'One of the lessons we have learned from this investigation is how vital something that might seem innocuous can be when it is put together with other facts. Circumstantial evidence can be woven into a very strong evidential chain,' he said.
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