Financial Crime In Ireland

This chapter was originally published in The Euromoney Financial Crime & Cyber Security Handbook 2014/15.

Jury trials

It is a feature of the Irish criminal system that the right to trial by jury in respect of serious crimes is well-nigh absolute. The District Court (a judge-only court) has jurisdiction to deal with summary offences but generally speaking indictable offences are tried in the Circuit or Central Criminal Courts before a judge and jury. Although the Special Criminal Court, composed of three judges and no jury, could theoretically hold a trial involving a financial offence, to date trials before the Special Criminal Court have typically had a terrorist or organised crime element.

In England, concern at the duration and cost of complex fraud cases (the Systech fraud trial collapsed in 2005 after two years at trial when jurors went on strike, at an estimated cost of €50m) prompted the government to pass Section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which allowed for the trial of fraud offences on indictment without a jury where the likely length or complexity of the trial would make it unduly burdensome. This provision has since been repealed, but the fundamental concerns giving rise to it remain, and there still exists in England a detailed protocol which sets out the procedure for the management of complex and lengthy fraud trials to prevent difficulties arising.

No such protocols or provisions exist in Ireland, although similar concerns exist here also. The one recent alteration made in this respect was to amend the Juries Act in 2013 to allow for the empanelling of 15 jurors in lengthy trials, to prevent the risk of the trial collapsing if, due to withdrawals, the number of jurors dropped below 10. This power was invoked for the first time in the Anglo trial, and 14 jurors (one juror, ironically, having to be excused on the first day of the trial) duly heard all the evidence, and at the end of the evidence, 12 of them were selected by lottery to decide the guilt or innocence of the accuseds.

2013 saw the conviction of Thomas Byrne, a former solicitor on more than 50 counts of theft, deception and forgery arising from his alteration of his client's property deeds in order to borrow more than €52m from banks. This trial, which took 27 days, was notable not only for its length and complexity, but also for the use made by the prosecution of technology to simplify matters for the jury which unanimously convicted Mr Byrne on all counts.

It seems that concerns about the capacity of juries to try complex white collar crime cases will have been assuaged by the outcomes of the Byrne and Anglo trials, and it is unquestionable that the amendment of the Juries Act will assist in ensuring that duration alone will be less likely to cause the collapse of a trial. The diligence with which juries seem to approach their task is confirmed by the fact that in the Anglo trial, one accused was acquitted on all charges, while two others were convicted. Questions must still remain, however, as to the practicality of having a jury try a case of truly labyrinthine complexity over a period of many months, should this...