A former hotelier who was jailed for raping a 17-year-old employee after a staff party has failed in a second bid to overturn his conviction.
Brian Shaughnessy (55), formerly of Ballywinna, Craughwell, Co Galway, was convicted of raping the female part-time employee in the early hours of July 26th, 2010, in the presidential suite of the Loughrea Hotel and Spa, which he owned at the time.
He had denied the rape charge but was convicted by a jury in March 2013 and was sentenced to six years with one year suspended by Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan on June 10th, 2013, at the Central Criminal Court.
Shaughnessy then lodged an appeal, which was rejected in April 2020.
However, Shaughnessy then successfully applied to the Supreme Court on the matter and the case was sent back to the Court of Appeal in March of last year.
In his original appeal, Shaughnessy had claimed that his legal team did not adequately represent him at trial and that a timeline, which may contain a missing hour and 15 minutes that might have tested the credibility of the young woman's account of sexual violence, was inadequately put to her in cross-examination.
Shaughnessy had claimed these issues were mentioned as an afterthought in a defence speech to the jury, and generally glossed over.
His former legal team denied any claims of incompetence.
Transcript
It had been argued at the first appeal that this was “new evidence” in that the claim was not on the transcript, and it related to the manner in which his legal instructions were addressed by the previous legal team.
In dismissing the appeal on Tuesday, Court of Appeal President Mr Justice George Birmingham said the court had not been persuaded “that the trial was unfair or that the complaints made about the performance of the legal team lead to a conclusion that the conviction is unsafe”.
Delivering the judgement of the three-judge court, Mr Justice Birmingham, sitting with Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and Ms Isobel Kennedy, said that what emerged from the affidavits and the oral evidence was that, following his conviction, the appellant was “extremely dissatisfied” with the manner in which his “two-hour-plus” defence had been presented, and that as a result, he believed he had “not received a fair trial”.
The court noted that the fact that Shaughnessy and the complainant were in the presidential suite of the hotel for a period was not in dispute. What was in dispute, it said, was what occurred in the presidential suite.
Mr Justice Birmingham said it was a “striking feature” of the case that even after the preparations for trial, the appeal, a Supreme Court hearing and two further days of appeal hearings, Shaughnessy had still offered “no explanation” as to what occurred during the "substantial" period of time he and the victim were in the suite.
“In a situation where it appears the defence counsel did not have available to him an alternative account, provided by his client, of what had occupied the time, the scope for probing this issue effectively was limited,” he added.
He said it was the court’s view that the significance of the actual time spent in the suite was “considerably diminished” in circumstances where Shaughnessy was not putting forward a “specific account” of what was taking up the time.
In the Supreme Court's decision sending the case back to the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Peter Charlton said it was "manifestly not possible” to decide whether or not defence counsel was actually incompetent without hearing more evidence about the instructions actually given or what the accused’s version of events were.
At a second appeal hearing which took place in July 2022, Shaughnessy said that he handed four "critical" documents to his defence team on the Friday before his trial, which began the following Monday.
He claimed that the documents contained the time a key card was issued from the front desk in the hotel at 3.23am before he and the 17-year-old went "straight up" to the room with wine and two glasses.
Phone records
He further claimed that there were 22 phone records also submitted to his legal team that showed a final call from the hotel for a taxi for the young woman who left at 5.41am - over two hours after the key was issued.
He claimed he also supplied his own phone records and the phone records of the complainant, who was sending texts from the room immediately before she left.
At the second appeal hearing, Hugh Hartnett SC, for Shaughnessy, said that the issue of how long the young woman was in the room was "critical" to the appeal.
He said the woman told the trial that she was in the room for 30 minutes, but this was not consistent if she was "nearly immediately assaulted yet stayed there for over two hours".
Mr Hartnett said that the "two-hour" defence that Shaughnessy claims he "constantly" pressed on his legal team was not adequately represented in trial. This was the "stark, factual issue which the court must decide", counsel said.
At the hearing, Shaughnessy admitted to Paul Greene SC, for the State, that he had initially told gardaí that he was in the room for 45 minutes and that while he had made other errors, he said his story "never changed".
The appellant said that he raised the issue of the two hours "categorically, and in every meeting with my legal team" but claims he was told to leave the matter in the hands of the team.
He said he had no "reason" to remember the night when he spoke to gardaí, adding that five months had elapsed before he spoke to them.
Shaughnessy said that timeline evidence regarding the key card and phone evidence was never put in questions to the complainant nor put before the jury.
He told Mr Greene: "I couldn't be more clear: my defence was not put to the jury. The Supreme Court took us in and that's why we're here today. My story has never changed."
Shaughnessy said that because of his time in jail he missed his father's funeral, had separated from his wife "and I was taken away from my kids for a crime I didn't commit”.
Solicitor Gearoid Geraghty represented Shaughnessy at his trial. Mr Geraghty, who is 31 years practicing criminal law, told Mr Hartnett that the two-hour defence was not a viable strategy during the trial and was something raised by Shaughnessy afterwards.
Mr Geraghty told Mr Hartnett that because Shaughnessy told gardaí he was in the room for 45 minutes, the two-hour strategy would put his first statement in doubt.
The solicitor said he believed it "would be a nonsense" to raise a conflict between the two hours and the 45 minutes at trial.
Mr Geraghty said that "on one construction, it could make our client a liar".
In dismissing the appeal today, Mr Justice Birmingham noted that the matter before the court has had “a long and complex history”.
The judge said that it was clear that since the conviction, Shaughnessy had consulted with “numerous solicitors”.
“As the appellant moved from solicitor to solicitor, he seems to have been determined to pursue the issue of inadequacy of counsel,” he said.
“He remains so determined despite being advised on many occasions that he had no case in that regard, some of those so advising being members of the Inner Bar who would be regarded as pre-eminent in the field of criminal defence.”
He said Shaughnessy’s criticism of his defence team related to how the question of timing, specifically, the amount of time spent in the presidential suite, was dealt with by his lawyers.
He noted that Shaughnessy said this was not dealt with effectively and in accordance with his instructions and had argued that had it been, “the outcome of the trial would, or certainly might have, been different”.
However, the judge said that in this case “we do not believe there is even a hint of a suggestion of a disregard of the appellant’s interests” and noted that rather, “it seems that the height of the appellant’s case is a complaint that the so-called two-hour-plus defence was not pursued adequately, or indeed pursued at all”.
The court noted that it was “not in doubt” that this phrase had entered the lexicon of this case “only in relatively recent times” and formed “no part” of the language of the case back in 2013 when the trial took place.
The judge said that, at this remove from trial, “the sense one has is that the issue of the so-called two-hour-plus defence has acquired a much greater significance in the mind of the appellant than the issue had before trial”.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can call the national 24-hour Rape Crisis Helpline at 1800-77 8888, access text service and webchat options at drcc.ie/services/helpline/ or visit Rape Crisis Help.
