Mr Albert Reynolds was denied a fair trial in his libel case against the Sunday Times because of the misdirections of the judge to the jury and there was no alternative but to order a new trial, the Court of Appeal judges stated yesterday.
In the judgment, the judges said the summing-up was indeed long and the judge did little to relate the evidence to the specific issues. It could not have been an easy direction to assimilate. They had considerable sympathy with the jury in its task of seeking to analyse large tracts of undigested material.
However, defects of form or presentation would not entitle Mr Reynolds to the relief he sought unless the misdirections complained of, singly or cumulatively, lead them to the opinion that some substantial wrong or miscarriage had been occasioned.
In approaching the question, their task was not to decide whether the jury gave the right answers to the questions put to it but to consider whether the misdirections complained of, singly or cumulatively, were such as to deny Mr Reynolds a fair trial of his claim.
"With very great regret, because we are mindful of the consequences, we conclude that the misdirections which we have identified above were, cumulatively, such as to have that effect. Having reached that conclusion, we have no effective alternative but to set aside the verdict, finding and judgment of the court below and order a new trial of this action," the judges ruled.
One complaint was that the judge read large tracts of the Civil Evidence Act respectively relied on by the parties with no attempt to summarise it or relate it to the is sues or highlight the more significant passages. It was also contended that the judge's summing-up was confusing and unstructured.
"We see considerable force in these criticisms," the judges stated. They added that the costs of the first trial must await the outcome of the retrial or further order, save for the costs of the qualified privilege arguments on which they would invite submissions.
Mr Reynolds complained about the judge's direction on a number of aspects, including damages. The judge had given an initial direction and Mr Reynolds's counsel in the absence of the jury invited the judge to give a further and fuller direction on damages.
"The judge's supplementary direction did to some extent make good his earlier omission but his treatment of this important matter remained perfunctory and its introduction as an afterthought can only serve to diminish the significance of this aspect in the eyes of the jury," it stated.
The judgment, referring to the newspaper's plea of justification, states that Mr Reynolds argued that the judge wrongly failed to direct the jury's attention to the first major issue for their decision, which was whether, given Mr Reynolds's knowledge and state of mind on Monday, November 14th, 1994, he knowingly misled the Dail in his speech on the Tuesday.
In their judgment, the passage Mr Reynolds complained of relating to this issue was a misdirection. On the question of malice, the trial judge gave a textbook direction on the law of malice and no criticism was made of it.
"A proper direction on the facts relevant to malice was of importance, both in relation to qualified privilege and in relation to the calculation of damage. The judge did not deal with this adequately and we regard this as a significant deficiency in his direction," the appeal judges concluded.
On costs, the judges said that the correctness of the trial judge's decision to award one penny in place of the jury's zero damages had become academic and the court had not heard any developed argument on it.