The jury in the trial of a 35-year-old man, who is accused of murdering John ‘King’ O’Connor in New Ross, Co Wexford, on New Year’s Eve 2024, has been discharged.<\/p>\n
Wayne Roche, previously of Dominic\u2019s Place in Waterford city, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr O\u2019Connor on 31 December 2024.<\/p>\n
The trial opened yesterday before a jury of six men and six women at the Central Criminal Court in Waterford.<\/p>\n
However, Mr Justice Patrick McGrath said this afternoon that a member of the jury had recognised a close family member of someone who is “intimately involved in the case”.<\/p>\n
The judge said that given it was still at an early stage in the trial, it was better to start “afresh” and empanel an entirely new jury.<\/p>\n
Mr Justice McGrath said this had occurred through no fault of anyone, and he thanked the jury for their service.<\/p>\n
The judge said an issue such as this can particularly arise where the families of both the accused and the deceased are well-known in the area.<\/p>\n
The trial is expected to begin again before a new 12-member jury at Waterford Courthouse tomorrow morning.<\/p>\n
Three weeks have been set aside for the trial to be completed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The jury in the trial of a 35-year-old man, who is accused of murdering John ‘King’ O’Connor in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-410125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}