The Court of Criminal Appeal has quashed the manslaughter conviction against Co Mayo farmer Pádraig Nally over the shooting dead of a man at his farm in 2004, and has ordered that he be retried.
In an 18-page ruling, the court said that "as events transpired, the jury were denied the opportunity to return a verdict of not guilty" in Mr Nally's trial.
Mr Nally (62), was appealing his conviction for the manslaughter of John "Frog" Ward (42), a member of the Travelling community and a father of 11.
He was sentenced to six years in jail last November after a jury found the farmer, of Funshinaugh, Cross, Co Mayo, not guilty of the murder of Mr Ward but guilty of his manslaughter. He had been shot twice and beaten with a stick.
The second and fatal shot was fired after Mr Ward, from Carrowbrowne halting site on the outskirts of Galway city, had left the farmyard on October 14th, 2004, and was limping down the road. During his trial, Mr Nally told the Central Criminal Court that he never intended to kill Mr Ward.
Mr Nally's counsel, Brendan Grehan SC, said the trial judge Mr Justice Paul Carney had erred in law by not allowing the jury to consider a defence of self-defence and by not allowing it to bring in an acquittal.
At the trial Mr Justice Carney told the jury it could only bring in a verdict of either guilty of murder or guilty of manslaughter.
In his defence, Mr Nally told the jury that in the 18 months before the shooting, there were two break-ins at his property and he was growing increasingly paranoid and fearful and believed his life was under threat.
Mr Grehan submitted that the single point of appeal against Nally's conviction was an important constitutional point. He said that was whether or not there were any circumstances in which a trial judge could direct a jury that it must convict in the absence of a concession by the defence that acquittal was not an option in the case. He said that in this case the trial judge had done so at the request of the prosecution.
In the ruling today Justice Nicholas Kearns said: "This court has little doubt but that had the prosecution allowed this trial to proceed in the usual manner, the learned trial judge would have given appropriate directions to the jury in the usual form.
"That usual form would have enabled the trial judge express his opinion that the amount of force used could not in his view be objectively justified in the context of the defence of self-defence, but would have left the ultimate decision on that issue to the jury.
"As events transpired the jury were denied the opportunity to return a verdict of not guilty, even if such a verdict may have flown in the face of the evidence and however inappropriate the learned trial judge might have considered such an outcome to be."
Mr Nally has returned to the Midlands Prison, Portlaoise, where he will be released on bail later today.
