Life-term prisoner drops court fight over teacher murder verdict
A Slovak national serving life for a 2022 Offaly killing has scrapped his attempt to overturn the guilty finding. A 16 July session will look at sentence backdating.
Life-term prisoner drops court fight over teacher murder verdict
A Slovak national serving life for a 2022 Offaly killing has scrapped his attempt to overturn the guilty finding.
Defence barrister John Berry told three appeal judges on Friday that Jozef Puska, 35, had signed papers inside the Central Criminal Court in Dublin formally ending the challenge. Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy confirmed the court had the paperwork and marked the matter as dropped.
Puska was found guilty of murdering 23-year-old Ashling Murphy on 12 January 2022 while she jogged beside the canal near Tullamore. Jurors concluded he stabbed her repeatedly in the neck before fleeing.
One procedural point remains. Counsel asked the court to list the case on 16 July for a short hearing on whether the life term was backdated correctly. The trial judge counted the sentence from November 2023, when jurors returned their verdict, rather than from January 2022, when the accused was first detained after arrest.
During sentencing, the trial judge said any parole review would need to weigh the unknown motive, adding that unless illness or age intervened, "the question of your safe return to society will be or should be a very open one." Berry estimated the remaining hearing would need about 15 minutes.
The prisoner, formerly of Lynally Grove in Mucklagh, has said he does not want to attend on that date, even by video-link. He had denied guilt, but forensic evidence tied him to the scene: genetic traces beneath the victim's fingernails, fingerprints and DNA on a bicycle found nearby, and facial scratches matching thorns along the waterway.
The appeal had originally been set for April, but that hearing was cancelled after his first lawyers sought to withdraw over client instructions. A new July date was fixed, yet last week Berry hinted the session might be brief; on Friday he confirmed it would not go ahead at all.
Source: The Irish Times
Source: Irish Times