A man who spent over three years serving a life sentence for the murder of teenager Cameron Reilly has had his conviction quashed after the Court of Appeal found the trial judge’s instructions to the jury lacked balance.
Mr Justice John Edwards said today during the trial of Aaron Connolly “such were the stridency and emphasis” of comments made by Mr Justice Tony Hunt, “there is a real possibility the jury could have perceived that he was personally convinced of the guilt of the accused and that implicitly he was pressing them to deliver a guilty verdict”.
The trial jury heard that Mr Connolly, who is now aged 26, initially denied that anything sexual happened between him and Mr Reilly on the night and had told gardaí that he was “straight”.
However, on the seventh day of the trial, Mr Connolly made admissions through his lawyers that he performed oral sex on Cameron Reilly on the night he was killed. The accused said that when he left, Mr Reilly was still alive and standing up.
Cameron Reilly was killed in Louth in 2018
Friends of Mr Reilly gave evidence to the trial that he had confided in them that he was bisexual shortly before his death.
Mr Connolly, of Willistown, Drumcar had pleaded not guilty to the murder of 18-year-old Cameron Reilly at Shamrock Hill, Dunleer, Co Louth, on 26 May 2018, but was found guilty by a unanimous jury verdict in December 2022.
Mr Reilly, a DKIT student, had been part of a group of around 15 young people who gathered in a field on the outskirts of the town on the night of 25 May.
Alcohol and cannabis were consumed by some of those present, although Mr Reilly’s best friend told the trial Cameron never took drugs.
The group went to a local takeaway to get food shortly after midnight.
Mr Reilly’s body was found in the field the following morning by a man out walking his dog.
Chief State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan told the trial the teenager’s cause of death was asphyxia due to external pressure on the neck with no other contributing factors.
In his initial statement to gardaí, Mr Connolly said he and Mr Reilly went in different directions at the end of the night and after the pair parted, he “never looked back” to see which way Cameron went.
In launching an appeal against the conviction last June, Michael Bowman SC, representing Connolly, said Mr Justice Hunt had sought to reduce the defence case to the possibility of a “peeping Tom” who had come out of the bushes aroused or angry and killed Mr Reilly.
“That is nothing if not denigrating of the defence case,” he said.
He asked the three-judge court to look at the possibility that “a line had been crossed” and amounted to “a deconstruction of the defence closing and thereby of its defence”.
Mr Bowman also raised the issue of how admissions made by Connolly through his counsel during the trial were dealt with in the judge’s charge.
These admissions were made under section 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984, which allows an accused person to admit certain parts of the prosecution case, removing the need to call witnesses to prove those aspects.
In delivering the Court of Appeal’s judgment today, Mr Justice Edwards said that the court agreed with the submissions made by Connolly’s barristers that Mr Justice Hunt’s charge to the jury lacked balance, and that in places “it may have been perceived by jury members as advocacy”.
The conviction was therefore quashed, with the Director of Public Prosecutions now to decide whether to apply for a retrial of the accused.