Catherine Nevin's appeal for her murder conviction should bring to light a series of contradictions, writes JOHN WATERS
SOON, THE Court of Criminal Appeal will rule on whether Catherine Nevin is entitled to have her conviction for the murder of her husband declared a miscarriage of justice. Among the options open to the court are freeing Nevin or ordering a retrial.
The case before the appeal court relates primarily to the credibility of three State witnesses who say she sought to persuade them to kill her husband. The court has been asked to examine and admit as evidence various classified files and documents which, it is alleged, would cast doubt on the character and credibility of these witnesses. The defence has argued that, in the event that the court identifies a dent in the credibility of any one of the witnesses, the whole case must fall. The case against Nevin was of such delicate construction that this is by no means an unreasonable proposition.
There was no forensic or other direct evidence connecting Catherine Nevin to the murder of her husband in March 1996. The State’s case amounted to the proposition that she had previously asked people to kill her husband, so the fact that he was murdered some years later rendered reasonable the inference that she had commissioned his assassins. The thrust of the direct evidence related to various episodes of solicitation from 1989 and 1990. This, together with certain circumstantial evidence relating to her behaviour on the night of the murder, was sufficient to convince a jury whose conviction was upheld on appeal.
There were two distinct planks to the prosecution’s case: on the one hand the three charges of solicitation; on the other, the charge of murder. None of the evidence established any link, other than one of supposition, between the two planks.
Judge Mella Carroll told jury members that, unless they could convict on at least one of the solicitation charges, they could not convict on the murder charge. She also said that a finding of guilty on any or all of the solicitation charges did not mean that Nevin should necessarily be found guilty on the murder charge. She told the jury that the prosecution had already accepted that the circumstantial evidence surrounding the murder charge was insufficient on its own, and that it therefore required “the additional factor or circumstances of soliciting to be added into the scales in order to tip the balance beyond reasonable doubt”. And yet, she also told them that they should not “use any one crime to prove that the other one was committed”.
There may be a thread of logic in this but it is difficult to pin down. If the four charges were to be treated in isolation, how could a finding of guilty in respect of even all three of the solicitation charges be used to confirm a verdict of murder, for which both the prosecution and the judge acknowledged the evidence was thin on the ground?
A further difficulty is that the circumstantial connection which the prosecution sought to make between the solicitation charges and the murder charge is undermined by a profound inconsistency. On the one hand, in its evidence concerning the solicitations, the State presented Catherine Nevin as a scheming, manipulative woman, who cunningly calculated every detail in conceiving her murder plot.
She seemingly told the men from whom she allegedly tried to procure her husband’s assassination exactly where her husband would be at precise times, how much money he would be carrying, and how she proposed to give herself an alibi. And yet, in respect of the night of the murder, the jury was invited to convict an altogether different Catherine Nevin. For, although the circumstances of the murder superficially resembled the plots Nevin was said to have put to each of the three witnesses some six or seven years earlier, the actual execution of the “alibi” would seem to have been carried out by a different woman. This woman, far from being cunning and well-prepared, seems to have cobbled together a clumsy account of two men who came into her bedroom, violently subdued her and tied her up.
Undoubtedly, there were a number of inconsistencies in Catherine Nevin’s story. But several of these offer the possibility of a benign explanation, given the circumstances and the confusion of someone who had, as she described, been woken violently from sleep to a nightmare that culminated in the discovery of her husband’s murder. There is a plausible interpretation of Catherine Nevin’s evidence that is consistent with her being fitted up by persons unknown.
Really, the case against Nevin was constructed on the shakiest of foundations, using the flimsiest of materials to manufacture a delicately interlocking argument owing more to suspicion, insinuated prejudice, speculation and interpretation than any trail of actual facts. The case was not simply a house of cards, but four separate card houses built to support each other. If any one card is removed from anywhere in the edifice, the whole thing cannot do other than collapse.