People (Attorney General) v Mills

• Jurisdiction: Ireland
• Judgment Date: 01 January 1957
• Date: 01 January 1957
• Court: Court of Criminal Appeal

Court of Criminal Appeal.

The People (Attorney General) v. Mills.

THE PEOPLE (at the Suit of the ATTORNEY GENERAL)

and

THOMAS J. MILLS (1)

Criminal law - Evidence - Identification - Showing photograph of suspected person to identifying witness - Description of suspected person given by witness - Defence of alibi - Weight of evidence - Extent of direction to be given to jury - Garda photographs of accused - Circumstances in which existence of such photographs may properly be mentioned to jury.

Criminal Appeal.

Application for leave to appeal by the accused, Thomas J. Mills, against the conviction and sentence recorded against him for the larceny of a wallet containing £104 10s. 0d. from the person of one, Mrs. Sybil Evans, on the 20th December, 1955. The accused was tried in the Central Criminal Court before Mr. Justice Teevan and a jury on the 1st May, 1956.

The case for the prosecution was that Mrs. Evans had first discovered that her handbag was open and the wallet and its contents gone while she was standing in a bus queue with her mother in North Earl Street, Dublin. Immediately prior to this discovery, she had observed a man whom she had felt jostling her, standing for some minutes beside her in the queue so as to make three abreast. She reported the loss of the wallet and its contents to the Gardaí that day, and the following day, the 21st December, two detective-officers called to her house and to them she described the man who had jostled her in the queue. On the 22nd December, she attended an identification parade at the Bridewell, where she identified the applicant as that man. On cross-examination of Mrs. Evans, counsel for the applicant for

the first time elicited the evidence that, on the 21st December, after she had described the man who had stood beside her in the queue but before she had identified the applicant as that man, the detective-officers to whom she had described the man called back to her house with six or eight photographs of different persons, including the applicant, and that she had then identified the photograph of the applicant as that of the man who had stood beside her in the queue. Mrs. Evans was the only witness called by the prosecution to identify the man who had stood beside and jostled her in the queue. The photographs submitted to Mrs. Evans for identification were not produced in evidence.

The applicant in his evidence denied having been near North Earl Street at all on the day in question, and both he and his wife stated in evidence that he was at home in Ballyfermot at the actual time of the alleged incident in the queue.

The applicant was found guilty of the...