The judge in charge of the Central Criminal Court has suggested abolishing the distinction between manslaughter and murder. Mr Justice Carney made his proposal in a talk to the Law Society in NUI Galway last night.
Mr Justice Carney said that in 2002 there was no outright acquittal in any murder trial. The area of contest in contested trials was between manslaughter and murder.
In nearly every case that comes before the Central Criminal Court it is accepted that the accused unlawfully killed the deceased, says the judge. The only issue to be decided is whether the verdict should be murder or manslaughter.
He said if there was a charge known as unlawful killing, with the verdict to be decided by the judge on the facts of the case, there would be no reason why there should not be a guilty plea in nearly every case.
The average length of time for a contested murder trial was 11 days in 2002. If homicide cases could be reduced to one day or half-day pleas, the backlog in the Central Criminal court could be contained or reduced, with a reduction in the trauma caused by delay affecting victims in both murder and rape cases, he said
There would be a substantial reduction in costs as contested murder trials involved an average of 100 witnesses.
A further argument in favour of abolishing the distinction was the fact that the victim's family in a murder case found it difficult to accept a manslaughter verdict.
"They feel that the case has been lost if the verdict is manslaughter rather than murder, and that they have not, as they put it, 'got justice'." This imposed gratuitous suffering on relatives.
Some people wanted the murder charge retained because of the mandatory penalty attaching to it. "This is a diplomatic way of saying that judges cannot be trusted."
However, he said the statistics from the Central Criminal Court showed a consistency in sentencing, and added that a life sentence was now "in effect what the Parole Board says it is to be".
He added that a half-way house would be to leave matters as they were but give the trial judge discretion in relation to sentence. This would increase the number of murder pleas, though it was impossible to say by how many.