DPP v Duff

• Jurisdiction: Ireland
• Judge: Finlay C.J.
• Judgment Date: 01 January 1995
• Neutral Citation: 1994 WJSC-CCA 2614
• Docket Number: 86/89,[C.C.A. No. 86 of 1989]
• Court: Court of Criminal Appeal
• Date: 01 January 1995

1994 WJSC-CCA 2614

THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEAL

Finlay C.J.

Budd J.

Geoghegan J.

86/89

DPP v. DUFF

THE PEOPLE AT THE SUIT OF THE DIRECTOR OF PUBLICPROSECUTIONS

.v.

DARREN DUFF

APPLICANT

Citations:

DPP V MCDERMOTT 1991 1 IR 359

DPP V O'REILLY 1990 2 IR 415

Synopsis:

EVIDENCE

Identification

Culprit - Sufficiency - Witness - Opportunity - Briefness - Visual identification - Trial judge - Refusal to direct acquittal - Appeal allowed - (86/89 - Court of Criminal Appeal - 10/5/93)

|The People v. Duff|

CRIMINAL LAW

Culprit

Identification - Proof - Sufficiency - Witness - Opportunity - Briefness - Visual identification - Trial judge - Refusal to direct acquittal - Appeal allowed - (86/89 - Court of Criminal Appeal - 10/5/93) - [1995] 3 IR 296

|The People v. Duff|

1 Judgment of the Court (ex tempore) delivered on the 10th day of May 1993 by Finlay C.J.

2 This is an application for leave to appeal against a conviction for robbery reached in the Dublin Circuit (Criminal) Court on the 13th of June 1989 in a trial of the Applicant had before the Circuit Court with a jury. The charge arose out of an incident in a bank which three persons entered, two of them being masked, and held up and robbed money from one of the officials of the bank. The lady named Ms. O'Neill who was oneof the bank officials identified in evidence the Applicant as a person who had come in front of her at the counter carrying something silver in his hand which appeared to be a gun and had seized or taken hold of a woman who was one of the customers at the bank. Her evidence indicated that two shouts occurred while she was doing some ordinary task behind the counter of the bank, one of them being "mind the cash" and the second of them being "get down", but at the shout "mind the cash" she looked up and saw the man whom she subsequently identified, in a manner which the Court will indicate, as the Applicant and then she heard the shout "get down" and she got down straight away. She didn't see him after that. Her opportunity to see him she assessed to be around thirty seconds and the extent to which she saw him was that he was wearing some form of glasses which she said might have been sunglasses and that she saw the side of his face with a collar turned up, one side of the face or profile of the face only. Subsequent to the robbery, at the request of members of the Garda Siochana, she travelled with members of the Garda Siochana in an unmarked car to Smithfield where the juvenilecourt was and she was informed that the purpose of her visit was to see if the suspect whom she had identified was there. She saw a person going into the Court and coming out of it and her own evidence concerning that matter is quite clear and possibly...