The family and lawyers of Co Donegal nightclub-owner Frank Shortt have welcomed the Supreme Court's decision to increase the damages to be paid to him for a miscarriage of justice from €1.9 million to €4.7 million.
Mr Shortt's award includes an unprecedented €1 million punitive damages to mark the court's abhorrence of the "outrageous conduct" by gardaí towards him.
In 1995, he was wrongly convicted of allowing the sale of drugs at his Point Inn premises in Quigley's Point, and served 27 months in jail.
Mr Shortt (72) is in poor health but his solicitor Kathryn Ward said last night the court's award "exceeded our wildest expectations" and her client now felt fully vindicated.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said the treatment of Mr Shortt by some members of the Garda was so bad it left no alternative for the Government but to pursue "radical reform" of the force.
"Anyone who strongly supports the Garda Síochána - as I and the vast majority of people in this country do - is entitled to feel a great sense of shock, disappointment and dismay at what happened to Frank Shortt," he said.
The Garda Commissioner yesterday declined to comment on the case, as did the Garda Representative Association and the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors.
In his judgment, the Chief Justice, Mr Justice John Murray, described the affair as "a stain of the darkest dye on the otherwise generally fine tradition of the Garda" and he criticised the "especially grave" abuse of Mr Shortt by Supt Kevin Lennon and Det Garda Noel McMahon.
The consequence for Mr Shortt was "a tormenting saga of imprisonment, mental and physical deterioration, estrangement from family, loss of business, public and professional ignominy and despair".
He was "sacrificed in order to assist the career ambitions of a number of members of the Garda".
The case involved "the undermining of the due process of law and inveigling, with perjured evidence, a jury of citizens, faithfully doing their duty, to convict an innocent man".
Punitive damages of the type awarded to Mr Shortt were intended as a warning that such a serious abuse of power by the State would not be tolerated, the judge said.
They were to remind the other organs of State there was "not only a duty to compensate a wronged man" but "to take all steps necessary to ensure, as far as practicable, that such deliberate abuse of power is not repeated but is prevented".
In his judgment, Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman said the enormous power conferred on gardaí made the events of this case "nothing less than an obscenity".
The State authorities had conceded only after "a long struggle" that Mr Shortt was the victim of "the worst known oppression of a citizen by the State" but the Garda had yet to apologise to him.
What happened to Mr Shortt was "so outrageous as almost to defy description but the Garda force has yet to admit this".
Mr Shortt, a married father of five, was jailed for three years after being wrongly convicted of allowing the sale of drugs in his nightclub, the Point Inn, on Donegal's Inishowen peninsula in 1992.
He served 27 months of the sentence in Mountjoy Prison, was put on anti-depressants and lost two-and-a-half stone.
Mr Shortt was not in court yesterday, but his son Jalisco and daughter Zabrina welcomed the judgment "unreservedly".
