THE LAW Society has written to the State Solicitor for Limerick, Michael Murray, asking him for information relating to his claim a solicitor had passed on inappropriate information to a client involved in crime.
Mr Murray made the allegation in relation to an unnamed solicitor in Limerick when speaking on The Week in Politics on Sunday about the provision in the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act for the holding of detention hearings in secret.
Director general of the Law Society Ken Murphy said: “We wrote to Michael Murray asking him to place what, on the face of it, would constitute the most serious misconduct by solicitors in the hands of the statutory body for dealing with it .”
He added the society recognised Mr Murray was a solicitor with an extremely difficult job. “We support him in the work he is doing in the public interest. But an allegation of this kind has a tendency to damage all solicitors, especially defence solicitors, and it is startling to see it being used as a basis for a change in the law. We take the matter most seriously, and it is up to anyone who has such information to send it to the Law Society.”
Mr Murray said he stood over what he had said on Sunday, but understood the matter in which it arose was still before the courts. Referring to the letter from the 133 lawyers seeking more time to have the Bill debated, he said there was no comparison between jury trial here and in the US and the UK, as ours was a much smaller community. “There is no comparison between New York and Dublin, or Birmingham and Dublin, even,” he said.
Mr Murphy responded that if there was a serious problem of jury intimidation, there would be examples of “perverse acquittals” – acquittals against the evidence. He was unaware of any, he said.
James McGuill, a recent former president of the Law Society who practises mainly in criminal law, said any problem of jury intimidation in a city like Limerick could be dealt with by transferring the case out of Limerick, or by making all of Munster a jury panel.
Referring to the Bill as a whole, he said, “If the gardaí are given this sort of power you can forget all the progress made over the past 10 years.”
Finbar McAuley, professor of criminal law in UCD and also a member of the Law Reform Commission, said there was no reason to ram the legislation through without further debate: “I can’t see the advantage of railroading it through.The basic principle from which to begin a debate is that the system we’ve got was fashioned for ‘ordinary’ crime and when we have ‘extraordinary’ crime it raises an issue. If we are going to depart from norms, we need compelling evidence to justify it. We need a proportionate response.
“If there is some evidence of jury tampering is there a more proportionate response, like moving the trial? There is a sense this is disproportionate.”