Supreme Court refuses to hear woman's appeal against Hutch murder

Ann O'Loughlin

The Supreme Court has refused to hear a woman’s appeal against her conviction in the Special Criminal Court for Gareth Hutch’s murder.

Regina Keogh (45), a mother-of-five, was found guilty of murdering Mr Hutch by colluding with her gunman brother.

She was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 by the non-jury court, which found she had colluded with Jonathan Keogh to cause serious injury to Mr Hutch.

Gareth Hutch, the 36-year-old nephew of Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch, was shot dead as he was getting into his car outside Avondale House flats on North Cumberland Street in Dublin.

Ms Keogh’s appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed last July.

Jonathan Keogh (37), of Gloucester Place, Dublin, was also jailed for life by the three-judge court, after being found guilty of the “deliberate and callous murder” on May 24th, 2016.

A third individual, Thomas Fox (35), of Rutland Court, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison alongside the Keoghs.

A three-judge Supreme Court said the ground of appeal advanced to it was “very limited”.

It was asserted, said the judges, that the trial court and Court of Appeal both erred in their analysis of the evidence.

Ms Keogh, with a previous address at Avondale House, claimed there was a “fundamental error” in the assessment of corroborative evidence relating to rubber gloves found at another woman’s home, the judges said.

The gloves had a DNA trace on their exterior that matched that of Jonathan Keogh, which was found to corroborate the other woman’s evidence that Ms Keogh brought the gloves to her flat.

It had been the State’s case that Ms Keogh had encouraged the woman to allow Jonathan Keogh to use her flat as a base to wait for Mr Hutch, as her kitchen window had a view into his flat.

The Special Criminal Court ruled that the woman was an accomplice and consequently approached her evidence as suspect. She was given immunity from prosecution.

The Supreme Court said there were other bits of evidence, such as telephone records, that led to substantial support for that woman’s account.

The Supreme Court’s Mr Justice Peter Charleton, Mr Justice Seamus Woulfe and Mr Justice Gerard Hogan said the Court of Appeal did not err in its conclusions on corroboration but “simply applied standard law”.

Nothing advanced by Ms Keogh met the constitutional threshold for appeal to the highest court, they said.

The court dismissed her application.