RTS Garda up on trial, Day 1
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news report 
Tuesday June 24, 2003 15:26
by hopespringseternal - independently organised resistence
Court 53, Brunswick st. District court
Today is the first day of Brian Haydn's (spelling?) case for simple assault against Garda Keith Goff, resulting from the charging of protesters at the Reclaim the Streets party last May 6th 2002.
This morning, the defence has being cross examing Brian Hayden (sp?), focusing specifically on his first statement which identified Garda Keith Goff as the garda who had hit him in the arm. In his statement he also i.d.'ed another garda as having hit him across the neck, but video footage later showed that it was a different garda. The defence has tryed to discredit his testimony by focusing on this discrepancy and there has being a arguement based around the use of "bad English" and good English! The Judge has being reluctant to accept this line of defence.
This afternoon Aidan O' Brian's video footage from the day will be shown as evidence.
The trial promises to last a few days. I have being told that the courts have being cleared of all other business for the next coming days.
Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2Latest reports say that the defence's case hinges on the fact that their is a time discrepancy based on a few seconds. The prosecution's case is that the assault and beating took place over the best part of a minute and is far more than that caught on the video footage.
Case resumes tomorrow morning.
Interesting morning and afternoon. Missed the first half hour or so, but Brian Hayden is doing very well under a lot of pressure from the defence lawyer, who admittedly is quite good at his job.
The linguistic/semantic messing around his statement (how sure is '98%' sure?) by the defence was a bit pathetic. The judge entertained it but didnt seem too impressed or interested in the line the defence was taking. Basically the defence was trying to say that if Brian had made a mistake when he said the first Garda (who hit him in the neck) was the same as the second Garda (who hit him in the arm), then he was probably making a lot more mistakes. Nonsense.
The afternoon session for the defence seemed to hinge on approximately four seconds of footage where Keith Goff had taken a swing at Brian but missed. They were saying that Brian identified this EXACT moment as the time when he was hit. The last remark of the day was when Brian said no, it happened just before this, off-camera. So tomorrow should be interesting.
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