Appeal by Regina Keogh against murder conviction rejected

The Court of Appeal has dismissed Regina Keogh’s appeal against her conviction for Gareth Hutch’s murder.

The mother-of-five was found guilty of murdering Mr Hutch by colluding with her gunman brother.

The 42-year-old was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 by the Special Criminal Court, which found that she had colluded with Jonathan Keogh to cause serious injury to Mr Hutch.

Jonathan Keogh (34) was also jailed for life by the non-jury court, having been found guilty of the “deliberate and callous murder’” on the morning of May 24th, 2016.

The 35-year-old nephew of Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch, was shot dead as he was getting into his car outside Avondale House flats on North Cumberland Street in Dublin.

Regina Keogh, with a former address at Avondale House, and her brother, Jonathan Keogh, of Gloucester Place also in the north inner city, had denied murder.

A third man had also denied the crime. Thomas Fox (32) of Rutland Court was convicted and sentenced to life in prison alongside the Keoghs.

It was the State’s case that Regina Keogh was “instrumental” in planning the murder. It contended that she encouraged her “best friend” to allow Jonathan Keogh use her flat “as a base” to wait for Mr Hutch, as her kitchen window had a view into his flat.

Prosecution witness

This woman, key prosecution witness Mary McDonnell, testified that Regina Keogh had told her: “That’s the only way it is going to happen.”

It was also the prosecution case that Regina Keogh went to Mary McDonnell’s flat the night before the shooting and gave her latex gloves to be used by the attackers the following day.

Mary McDonnell was initially arrested on suspicion of murdering Mr Hutch, later charged with withholding information, but ultimately given immunity from prosecution.

Regina Keogh appealed against her conviction at the Court of Appeal in December.

Her barrister, Patrick Gageby SC, pointed out that the trial court had made a specific ruling that corroboration of Ms McDonnell’s evidence was desirable.

He noted that the prosecution had never argued that the finding of Jonathan Keogh’s DNA on the gloves corroborated evidence that Regina Keogh had brought them to Ms McDonnell’s flat the night before.

However, “without any encouragement from the prosecution”, the court itself found that it did so, he said.

“This was a turning point for the court,” he added, explaining that this determination implicated his client.

He submitted that there was a “patent, innocent explanation on the record” for the DNA.

“On the morning of the murder, he handled the bundle of gloves, used at least two of them for his own purposes,” he said.

“In failing to reference this explanation, this was clearly an error of law,” he argued.

‘

Vastly overstating’

Fiona Murphy SC, responding on behalf of the DPP, said that the appellant was “vastly overstating” the importance of the gloves.

“I don’t think that’s what the court said at all, that it wouldn’t have convicted her without the gloves,” she submitted.

She said that there was no mistake by the Special Criminal Court and, if there was, it did not undermine the verdict because of all of the other evidence in the case.

She said that she had been in cases where the Court of Appeal had found an error but decided that it didn’t make the verdict unsafe.

Court President Justice George Birmingham, presiding, said the court would like to know the director’s position on what’s called the “proviso”.

He was referring to ability of the court to dismiss an appeal if it accepted that, although there had been some form of error in the trial, there was no “substantial miscarriage of justice”.

Ms Murphy later returned to court to say that, if the court were to agree with Mr Gageby, the director would ask the court to “invoke that proviso”.

However, Mr Gageby said that the court wasn’t dealing with a minor error of fact.

“It was a very large error of law,” he submitted. “In a jury trial, it would have had an enormous result… Absent the gloves, it would not have been perverse for the jury to acquit.”

He described the alleged error as ‘a fundamental irregularity going to a core plank of the case’.

“The error, which we have identified, we believe is so core and so central that this court ought not to apply the proviso,” he submitted.

Rejected all grounds

However, on Thursday Justice Patrick McCarthy, who sat with Justice Birmingham, and Justice Isobel Kennedy rejected all grounds of appeal.

Mr Justice McCarthy said the appellant had argued that the trial court fell into error in the way it dealt with Ms McDonnell’s evidence and did not approach it with “the high degree of scepticism which was clearly required”.

That proposition, Mr Justice McCarthy said, is “simply wrong” as can be seen from the court’s judgement. He said the complaint “really seems to be” that the Special Criminal Court was prepared to proceed on the basis of Ms McDonnell’s evidence in crucial matters in a way unfavourable to Regina Keogh. The trial court, he said, was entitled to do so on the evidence.

In a written judgment, the court found that “the evidence about the gloves, taken in context with other immediately relevant evidence… undoubtedly was capable of constituting corroboration”.

Justice McCarthy said the court felt that the issue in relation to gloves “should not be over-complicated”.

He said the court noted Mary McDonnell’s evidence that the gloves were brought to her flat by Regina Keogh and CCTV footage shows Keogh making her way to the flat at the relevant time. Gloves matching those referred to by Ms McDonnell were found in her flat and were located in the pocket of a housecoat where she indicated she had put surplus gloves.

The gloves, on Ms McDonnell’s account, had been brought to the flat so that Jonathan Keogh could have access to them there and the gloves retrieved bore DNA matching that of Jonathan Keogh, thus increasing the significance of the find.

Justice McCarthy said that none of these conclusions of fact can properly be interfered with. He said it was “open rationally” to the court to take the view that Ms McDonnell was a credible witness and the conclusions were not perverse.

The court also concluded that there was no basis for saying that there was an insufficiency of explanation in the rulings of the trial court or some supposed failure of the trial.

They therefore dismissed the appeal.