Kearney Found Guilty of Wife’s Murder.
Brian Kearney exited the Central Criminal Court today, to begin his life sentence for the murder of his wife Siobhán in their South Dublin home on February 28th 2006.
The jury of eight women and four men found the 51 year old electric contractor, who denied strangling his wife with a vacuum flex and staging the scene to look like suicide, guilty of her murder at 3:45pm on a majority of eleven to one, after five hours and 24 minutes of deliberations.
Before the verdict was passed, Mr. Justice Barry White explained that although ‘it was a very tense moment for all concerned’, ‘emotional outbursts’ would be unnecessary.
Kearney’s face lacked any emotion or remorse as the sentence was being passed, while his daughter from a previous relationship, Aoife, wept on her father’s shoulder. Ms. Kearney’s family sobbed and embraced as the verdict was being revealed, as did several jurors.
The 38 year old mother-of-one’s body was discovered in the bedroom at their home in Goatstown, Dublin in February 2006 by her father, Owen Mc Laughlin, who had to kick the door in, which had been locked.
Although no DNA evidence could prove Mr Kearney’s guilt, evidence from State Pathologist, Dr. Marie Cassidy confirmed that the injuries suffered by the victim were consistent with ‘manual strangulation’, rather than strangulation from the vacuum flex.
Justice Barry White applauded the jurors for their services before dissolving them.
He said: “Thank you for your attention on this case. You have paid close attention to all the evidence presented.”
Outside, the victim’s sister Aisling Mc Laughlin read a statement from the victim impact report, expressing their joy at the verdict.
She said: “The faith and the trust that we have had in our Criminal Justice system has not been misplaced and we have not been let down…. Today, Siobhan has got justice, we have got justice and Siobhan’s murderer has got justice, and for that, we are most thankful.”
How it was done:
This article that I wrote was for my advanced news writing class. In addition to spending the day at the court to wait for the verdict and receive good quotes, I researched the story as it unfolded and the background to the case. When writing it for the blog, I modeled it off the stories I observed on the Washington Post website, using the introduction as the stand-first.
