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What to do with Padraig Nally
Read more about: Crime, Irish Politics, Law, Mayo
Originally posted at Plain of Pillars
The killing of John Ward has dominated conversation in Mayo for sometime. Yesterday, Padraig Nally, the confessed killer of John “Frog” Murphy walked free from court, having been acquitted of manslaughter.
At first glance, the verdict seems repugnant. Pavee Point has already decided that the verdict reflects the prejudiced nature of “the settled community.” However, the verdict becomes a little easier if you view the court case from the eyes of one of its jurors.
Padraig Nally was not an evil man. He lived a quiet life and was the kind of neighbour a hermit would be happy to have. But at some point, Nally lost objectivity. After becoming the victim of crime, he became paranoid and irrational. It did not help matters that his sole companion in his quiet home was his radio. Nally’s paranoia was nourished by sensationalist stories on shows like Joe Duffy’s Liveline that made the prospect of becoming the victim of violent crime seem probable rather that possible. When Ward and his son arrived at Nally’s door, it’s easy to imagine that he felt seriously and gravely threatened. So it’s hardly surprising that Nally’s actions reflected his state of mind.
So what would you do with a killer with Padraig Nally?
Would you send him to prison?
Does he belong with rapists and drug lords? Does he belong with paramilitaries and the men who make their money from the sex trade? Does he belong with the thieves that turned him into the irrational creature that he became?
Hardly.
No, Nally belongs in some sort of treatment centre where his distorted views of reality will not put him or others in harms way. Truth is, it probably would not even take much treatment to “cure” Nally of his misperceptions.
The problem is that the jurors who were charged with the task of deciding the guilt or innocence of Nally were not given that option. By the standards of the Irish legal system, Nally was not insane. And even then, he’s hardly the sort of man who belongs in the hell that is the Central Mental Hospital.
So the jurors chose the lesser evil. They set the man free, confident that in spite of the fact that they had set a confessed killer free, the streets of the nation were no more dangerous than they were when the man was in Garda custody. In fact, the only individual whose life was put in danger by the ruling was Padraig Nally. Let’s face it, the only circumstance where Nally was ever likely to be of danger to anybody was that situation he found himself on the day that John Ward arrived at his door, and the mistake that Nally made on that day is one the he is certain never to make again.
Yesterday, justice was served, largely because the law was ignored. By most legal standards, Nally was guilty as sin.
The problem with the Irish legal system, and indeed most legal systems, is that they are designed by people who think that the first function of any law should be to punish wrong-doers, and perhaps, sometimes, on occasion, it should rehabilitate them, if rehabilitation can be carried out in a cost effective manner that involves making life a living hell for the person undergoing the rehabilitation.
For many reasons, both practical, logical and moral, this should not be the case. Every aspect of the legal system should be designed so as to prevent the occurrence of injustice. Injustice is what happens when an individual is denied their right to free and informed choice unnecessarily. Needless to say, life is a precondition for the existence of liberty. The only place that punishment should have in our legal system should be as a tactic to be used when rehabilitating those whose behaviour has inhibited another individual’s right to free choice.
People should not have their liberty denied them as a punishment. It should be denied to them only when to allow an individual full exercise of their liberty would be likely to result in a violation of another individual’s right to liberty.
What this means in the case of Padraig Nally is that man should have been detained if judged to have been a danger to himself or others, and he should have been released when this situation changed. There is no point in detaining a man who is not likely to re-offend, any more than there is in releasing somebody who probably will re-offend.
Of course, the Ward family would disagree no doubt. They would like vengeance. They would like to see Nally locked up for life. Indeed, if you put some of Ward’s relatives in the same room as Nally, chances are, they would extract revenge by taking Nally’s life. The same could be said in most situations where you put the family of a murder victim in the same room as the man who took their loved one’s life.
Vengeance has no place in any legal system. No matter how much we might empathise with the desires for vengeance felt by victims of crime, these desires are not rational. Vengeance serves no purpose other than itself. It cannot justify the infliction of suffering on another individual. Indeed, vengeance can often be partially satisfied by inflicting suffering on individuals who had no responsibility for the original crime. Palestinian suicide bombers often take the lives of Israeli as vengeance for crimes committed by Israeli soldiers, in spite of the fact that the civilians had nothing to do with the suffering they experienced. If a desire for vengeance is thought sufficient to warrant the infliction of pain on others, then supposed travesties of justice, like the imprisonment of the Birmingham Six, were, in fact, justifiable. No doubt the imprisonment of the six made many Englishmen feel a little better, regardless of the fact that the six were innocent.
Then again, it seems that many people in modern Ireland like to have laws that make them feel better, even if they lack logic. For instance, we currently have a situation where teenagers who engage in consensual sexual activity run the risk of imprisonment. The reason for this bizarre situation is that it makes people feel better to have the law the way it is, simply because it’s easier to catch sexual predators with the law as it is. We live in a situation where teenagers caught with a small amount of cannabis might end up in serious trouble with the law, because its easier to catch drug dealers with the law as it is. We even have people, like the Catholic Bishops, who would like to use the law as a way of promoting morality, or rather what they consider to be moral behaviour, regardless of the fact that this would have no positive effect, simply because it makes them feel a little better about themselves.
The argument made by those who would like to have a patchwork system of pop-laws is that they should be used in a common sense manner. This argument is ridiculous. A law that only serves justice when ignored is a joke, and worse than that, it’s a travesty of justice waiting to happen. The frequently quoted Oscar Wilde pointed out that Common Sense is not all that common, but this fact is better understood when you realise that one man, or one era’s Common Sense, is another’s Madness.
American’s all too happily gave up their rights to privacy when they welcomed in the Patriot Act. After all, it was going to be used to catch terrorists. What many failed to consider was the possible future uses of the legislation? Indeed, they might have done well to look to the past. What would MacCartney’s witch hunt have looked like if he had twenty-first century technology and the rights given to the US government under the Patriot Act?
Somehow, I think that McDowell and his ilk are totally unfamiliar with the arguments I’m making. After all, he seems like the kind of man whose most comfortable when quoting Plato (in Latin of course) in the halls of some grand Debating society, but let’s face it, there’s an election round the corner (there usually is) and no politician has ever got elected on the back of headline measures that the outrage brigade would interpret as being soft of crime. So we’ll stumble on with our patch-work of pop-laws until the day that they turn against us and the legal system implodes, but maybe, just maybe, next time, we’ll inject a little logic into the legal system. After all, it would be nice if the judge and the jury could serve both justice and the law.
The reality is that John “Frog” Ward was a very dangerous man, with 17 previous convictions and 4 bench-warrants out for his arrest. The thesis that his intentions were honorable when he trespassed on Padraig Nally’s land is pure delusion. Ward had also threatened Gardai with slash-hooks. It was either Ward or Nally as far as I can see.
Nally is free after one conviction and Pavee Point complains about a lack of justice for his victim. Why don’t Pavee Point complain that Frog Ward was free after 17 convictions and 4 bench warrants and the lack of justice for his many many victims.
Or do Pavee Point believe that the only fair justice system is one that sets rampaging violent travellers free but jails any settled person who fights back.
When Pavee Point start to condemn the higher than average criminal activities in their own community then perhaps I’ll take them seriously. But I suspect Sinn Fein will condemn IRA criminality long before Pavee Point condemn traveller criminality.
“The thesis that his intentions were honorable when he trespassed on Padraig Nally’s land is pure delusion.”
Can you tell us who is putting forward such a thesis?
“Ward had also threatened Gardai with slash-hooks. It was either Ward or Nally as far as I can see.”
Had Ward ever killed anyone during his extensive criminal career?
The argument that Frog Ward was never convicted of killing someone misses the point completely.
Every winter elderly people are beaten to death in their west of Ireland homes for as little as €15. Would you prefer the elderly person to wait until the death blow was struck and then and only then once they are certain that they were dying they should use their last ounce of strength to blow the scumbag away?
The Western seaboard has been terrorised by scumbags looking for easy pickings and sadistic pleasures. There is a genuine feeling of fear and terror among elderly people in isolated homes. Nally was the first to fight back and Frog Ward was in the wrong place at the wrong time when that fight back began.
“The argument that Frog Ward was never convicted of killing someone misses the point completely.”
I think it’s relevant to Brian “FutureTaoiseach” Boru’s assertion that “it was either Ward or Nally”. He’s saying that Ward would have killed Nally if he hadn’t been killed himself, but there is absolutely no evidence to support that. Maybe that’s what Nally was thinking at the time, but there is no reason for us to share this belief.
“Every winter elderly people are beaten to death in their west of Ireland homes for as little as €15. Would you prefer the elderly person to wait until the death blow was struck and then and only then once they are certain that they were dying they should use their last ounce of strength to blow the scumbag away?”
That’s the only other option, is it? Either people must be allowed to finish off all intruders summarily or meekly accept slaughter themselves? You don’t think there’s any possible middle ground?
You’re so full of great ideas what middle ground would you suggest.
You’re living alone in your 70s. You’ve been robbed several times recently and you know from news reports that people in your position have been beaten to death by violent sadistic intruders. You discover a man in your back yard with a history of violence and assault. Now do you bring him into your kitchen to talk to him about his troubled youth and the reasons society have abondoned him and forced him into crime.
Joemomma you seem more concerned with the rights of convicted criminals. The reality is that this man was up to no good and was an extremely dangerous man. So he didn’t kill anyone - does this mean Nally had no right to self-defence? The civil-liberties’ crowd seem to consider someone being part of a minority alone to justify standing up for them no matter what their level of criminality. It’s a PC-agenda that is blind to the complexities of life. The fact that John Ward was a Traveller is not the reason Nally was acquitted. The reality is that those on the high moral perch seem incapable of asking themselves is what they would do if they discovered a man with 17 previous convictions, who had threatened Gardai with slash-hooks, and had 4 bench-warrants for their arrest, breaking into their home in the dead of night. Personally I would be terrified if that happened and would consider myself as having the right to defend myself. I would like to think I would be proportionate but it’s extremely hard to think calmly and rationally in such a situation. Yes I believe Nally went too far but who am I to judge when I have not been in that position myself? However I will add that some years ago my parents house was robbed and €2,000 in cash stolen so I am naturally particularly inclined to feel for the victim of burglary. Ward intended to burgal Nally’s home and that seems pretty clear to me based on his criminal record. Do we have to wait until such individuals go as far as murdering someone before we aggregate to ourselves the right to defend ourselves if necessary with the use of force?
“You’re living alone in your 70s. You’ve been robbed several times recently and you know from news reports that people in your position have been beaten to death by violent sadistic intruders. You discover a man in your back yard with a history of violence and assault. Now do you bring him into your kitchen to talk to him about his troubled youth and the reasons society have abondoned him and forced him into crime.”
cf, you write as if you’ve never encountered the concept of reasonable self-defence. Apparently you inhabit a world where intruders must either be killed or mollycoddled. Do I really have to enumerate for you the million or so ways that Nally could have seen Ward off his property without actually killing him?
“Joemomma you seem more concerned with the rights of convicted criminals.”
No, but frankly I am more concerned with the right to life than with property rights.
“So he didn’t kill anyone - does this mean Nally had no right to self-defence?”
Obviously Nally had the right to self-defence. Are you as unimaginative as cf that you can’t conceive of any form of self-defence short of actual killing?
“The reality is that those on the high moral perch seem incapable of asking themselves is what they would do if they discovered a man with 17 previous convictions, who had threatened Gardai with slash-hooks, and had 4 bench-warrants for their arrest, breaking into their home in the dead of night. Personally I would be terrified if that happened and would consider myself as having the right to defend myself.”
Of course, by the time you had done all the research necessary to find out all that information about your intruder, he would already have made off with your DVD player. You do know that Nally didn’t know any of this information about Ward, don’t you?
“Do we have to wait until such individuals go as far as murdering someone before we aggregate to ourselves the right to defend ourselves if necessary with the use of force?”
No, but it used to be a fairly widely accepted principle that you don’t kill someone unless they are actually endangering you. Perhaps that’s just another liberal concept whose time has past - from now on criminal types will just be weeded out before they get the chance to murder anyone.
“No, but frankly I am more concerned with the right to life than with property rights.”
I hope you never have to put that to the test because fear is the ultimate antidote to political correctness. And yes you should list the million ways you think you could convince a scumbag to leave your isolated cottage without robbing all your earthly possessions and beating you to an inch of your life (if you’re lucky). You’ve been sniping and taking pot shots about the one suggestion people on this thread are making (i.e. the right to meet a lethal threat with lethal force). Step up and let us tell you how the criminal justice system on “seventh heaven” doesn’t actually work in the harsh reality you actually live in.
“I hope you never have to put that to the test because fear is the ultimate antidote to political correctness.”
Thanks for your concern. As it happens I’ve had to chase intruders off my property on two occasions. Somehow my liberal sensibilities survived the experience.
“And yes you should list the million ways you think you could convince a scumbag to leave your isolated cottage without robbing all your earthly possessions and beating you to an inch of your life (if you’re lucky).”
Well, one way would be to give said scumbag a sound beating, then shoot him in the leg. This is what Padraig Nally did, and it seems to gave been quite effective in causing John Ward to flee his property. Of course, Nally then went and reloaded his gun, went back to where Ward was crawling away and shot him dead, hence the reason we’re having this conversation.
“You’ve been sniping and taking pot shots about the one suggestion people on this thread are making (i.e. the right to meet a lethal threat with lethal force).”
What relevance does “the right to meet a lethal force with lethal force” have to the Nally case? Nally was not threatened with lethal force - if anything he was threatened by an unarmed man while he himself was armed with a shotgun. For what it’s worth I have no difficulty with people using lethal force in order to defend against same. Neither does the law.
“Step up and let us tell you how the criminal justice system on “seventh heaven” doesn’t actually work in the harsh reality you actually live in.”
It would work very much like it usually worked up until this latest Nally verdict, i.e. citizens have the right to use reasonable force in defence of themselves and others. Is it so very hard for you to imagine how that would work? Must every encounter end in a death?
Nally had run Ward off his property. He then killed him. At the time he fired the final shot, there was no immediate threat to his person or property. Shooting a man in the back when he is crawling out of your front door having already been shot and beaten severely is not self defence. It’s not proportionate to the threat.
One could argue that the first shot that Nally fired (the one that hit Ward in the leg and incapacitated him) was legitimate. I can’t see how anyone can argue that the second shot was not either murder or manslaughter.
Personally I’ve no sympathy for Ward but Nally crossed the line when he went back to the shed, found a cartridge, reloaded the gun, followed Ward’s trail of blood and then shot the Ward on the ground. Up to then he was fine (and I think that was the verdict of the judge in the first trial).
Of course the problem is Ward could have patched himself up and come back a few weeks later with 10 of his mates. The moral of the story is if you have an elderly relative living in an isolated location in the west of Ireland make sure they are OK and have some form of a panic alert system to nearby neighbours. That way they won’t have to face a trial or worse.
[i]“There is no point in detaining a man who is not likely to re-offend, any more than there is in releasing somebody who probably will re-offend.”[/i]
This point is central to your argument and it is simply wrong. A system of justice is to ensure, so far as is possible, that crimes are not committed. A person knows that if one commits a crime there are consequences, no matter who that person might be. By your logic, one could easily offend once and not suffer any legal consequences whatsoever…
“… So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to summarise, you cannot find my client guilty because, although he killed a man, he signed a sworn statement the day beforehand vowing that he’d only do it once. I rest my case.”
Padraig Nally acted in self defence to defend himself and his property, using reasonable force in so doing. He then killed a man. It’s that simple. To say otherwise is, as Carney put it in the original trial, perverse.
Dingbat, I’ve always imagined that the purpose of a legal system should be to prevent injustice, rather than anything else. Either way, you misunderstand me.
If somebody commits a crime, then steps must be taken to ensure that this will not happen again. And the criminal’s word isn’t good enough! Put them in a detention centre only if treating them within the community is likely to lead to them re-offending. Treat them until they realise that it is wrong to do what they did. Treat them so that if they found themselves in the same situation again, they’d act differently.
As for whether or not Nally’s actions constituted reasonable defence, well no they didn’t. But it easy to see that at the time, he could have imagined that his actions were reasonable and that there was no available alternative. Remember, the two shots were fired within about 90 seconds. Nally paniced, it’s crazy to suggest that he needs to go to prison.
Niall - I didn’t say that he should have been put in prison. I said he needed to be found guilty of a crime. This was a retrial and in that context they are two entirely different things. There was no reason why the jury could not have found him guilty of manslaughter and the judge to have given a two year suspended sentence which, of course, he would have already served.
The problem here is that legally speaking no law has been seen to be broken which is plainly wrong. The further problem is the precedent which has been created unless something is done.
If, as you say, the purpose of the legal system should be to prevent injustice then that is in complete contradiction to the view that this man should not have been found guilty of a crime.
Dingbat, just to clarify, I wasn’t referring to Nally, but to your suggestion that an individual who committed a murder, but promised he’d only murder once would not suffer any legal consequences under the scheme that I imagined where an individual is not sent to prison when they are not a threat.
Sorry about the confusion.
padraig mc nally shiuld have got the full force of the law. ,a warrant was put out for my arrest, i didnt hurt some one but iught was with went to jail. but arrested i was. i was in mountjoy for 3 days ,it was supposed to be for 14 only i waS bailed out by brother. Idid not deliberately set to hurt anyone, my only crime at that time was poverty.The man done what he thought was right, but if you read his statment it is frightening.If the law gave us all the go ahead like mc nally got, there would be anarchy. One law for Padraig mc Nally ,one law forme