An NUI Maynooth academic has appealed to criminal justice lawyers for their input on changes to evidence admissibility.

In April 2015,  the decision of  DPP v JC [2017] 1 IR 417 by the Supreme Court overhauled the exclusionary rule in relation to improperly obtained evidence by introducing an exception based on ‘inadvertence’.

The exclusionary rule had been in operation in this jurisdiction for 25 years.

Against this background, Professor Claire Hamilton of the Department of Law at Maynooth University, aims to build a knowledge-base on (post-2015) evidentiary admissibility in Ireland.

The aim of the research is to contribute to a wider understanding of the operation of the exclusionary rule in practice.

Collaboration

Professor Hamilton’s research is supported by the Irish Research Council and conducted in collaboration with the Trust for Civil Liberties and Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ICLT).

The research will be done through surveys and interviews with criminal law practitioners, both barristers and solicitors, on their experience of the exclusionary rule in practice since JC.

Information will be gathered anonymously through an online survey, which will take ten minutes to complete.

Confidential

The raw data will be strictly confidential to the researchers and only aggregated findings will be presented in their subsequent report.

The survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/M7YQV77