Chapter 26: The Verdict and Aftermath

JJ Muggivan

According to news reports, the jury in the Brendan O’Donnell trial returned to the court about two hours after commencing deliberations, requesting the transcript of several medical witnesses and the testimony of Ann Marie O’Donnell. The reports did not identify which medical testimony the jury wished to review. Ann Marie O’Donnell’s factual testimony was very supportive of the expert testimony suggesting that Brendan O’Donnell had been hallucinating for some time, was schizophrenic, was paranoid, and was not capable of acting rationally. The judge acknowledged the difficulties experienced by the jury in the light of such a lengthy trial, but explained that it was not possible to grant their request.

The fact that the jury requested these parts of the transcript suggests a desire to pay close attention to the legal standards for determining insanity in the case of Brendan O’Donnell. The verdict that was finally reached was that Brendan O’Donnell did not meet the legal standard for insanity.

Brendan O’Donnell was found guilty of the murders and initially sentenced to life in prison. A short time later, he was given an additional four life sentences.

At the time of his trial, Brendan was already dying from his medication.

Shortly after being sentenced, Brendan was transferred to Dundrum by Dr Charles Smith. Dr Smith, in his deposition given for the inquest, acknowledged that Brendan was a very troubled young man, and stated that he had agreed that although he had not been found to be insane, Brendan could stay in Dundrum after his trial, until such time as he settled clinically. Brendan had been transferred from Mountjoy to Dundrum prior to the trial because of his hunger and thirst strike, and had started to eat and drink shortly afterwards.

After the trial, Brendan was transferred to Arbor Hill, but by arrangement with the Governor at that prison, he was moved back to Dundrum.

However, according to Dr Smith, Brendan never really settled into a comfortable routine, and remained in the admission unit of the Central Mental Hospital. Dr Smith said that Brendan ‘presented regularly with bizarre physical symptoms for which we could find no explanation’. During this time, he was prescribed various medications, though never in high dosage. According to Dr Smith, nothing that was prescribed for Brendan seemed to be particularly beneficial.

At the end of May 1997, Mary Quinn and her granddaughter visited Brendan. They said that he was ‘not too bad that day’. He was ‘a bit fidgety’ but not as bad as he had been previously, and he

spent time talking to his nephew, Aaron.

The staff at Dundrum were still concerned about the threat posed by Brendan but believed that he was actually most likely to harm himself. Some time after this visit, he broke a window with his fist and was sent to St Vincent’s Hospital where he was treated for lacerations.

On 22 July 1997, in order to tranquillise him after this incident, Brendan O’Donnell was given 100mg of a drug called Thoridazine, and the following day he had 200mg of it. On 24 July, Brendan was found dead.

Ann Marie had spent the previous day with her grandmother, because it was her birthday. She returned to Portumna that night. On the evening of 22 July, she was ironing when Brendan ‘came straight into my head, for no reason at all’. The following morning, her son came to her bedroom door to tell her that there was a guard looking for her.

The guard told Ann Marie that her brother had passed away either late the previous night or early that morning. He told her that Brendan had died of natural causes. The guards had heard the report on the radio first, and had then had a phone call from Dr Smith in the Central Mental Hospital.

Ann Marie went to the garda station from where she spoke by phone with Dr Smith. The doctor told her ‘that he was very sorry for what had happened. A guard who was with Ann Marie prompted her to ask Dr Smith whether her brother had been on medication. The doctor said that he had been and explained about Brendan’s having hurt his hand. He said that the staff in Dundrum had performed CPR on Brendan when they had found him that morning, but when there was no response, they realised that he was dead.

Ann Marie was told that her brother’s body was on its way to the coroner’s, and would not be available to the family for a few days. The following morning, she agreed that Brendan’s remains would be cremated.

On 26 November 1997, Ann Marie and her grandmother attended the inquest into Brendan’s death. They listened as Dr Charles Smith spoke of Brendan’s self-mutilation, and described him as ‘one of the most complicated, problematic patients I have ever dealt with’. He said that Brendan’s had been a life with very little pleasure or achievement and one in which he was constantly challenging and fighting those in authority. Ultimately this had led to Brendan’s becoming extremely dangerous, destroying the lives of his victims and destroying his own chances of achieving any degree of contentment.

According to Ann Marie, Dr Smith ‘didn’t see anything wrong with the amount of medicine he got and [said] that he would have had a problem believing that the medicine killed him, that he believed it was cardiac arrest.’

Dr Smith gave evidence that other inmates had received the same amounts of medication, without the same result.

However, according to Ann Marie, the state pathologist, Dr John Harbison, was of the opinion that ‘Brendan O’Donnell died of overdosage of the drug Thioridazine’.

Ann Marie and her grandmother had to leave for a bus. The inquest jury put Brendan’s death down to misadventure. Michael Pat O’Donnell wanted to know only where and when his son had died.

On 30 June 1998, my brother, Tony Muggivan, visited Ann Marie and gave her the money needed to purchase a copy of the coroner’s report on her brother’s death. Ann Marie O’Donnell requested the report on her brother’s death, and paid the fee. Several months later, she obtained a copy.

According to a Department of Justice report, a year and a half after his death, Brendan was ‘being prescribed powerful, mood altering drugs when he died at the age of 21 in the custody of the Central Mental Hospital’. As the State does not keep records of prisoners’ prescriptions, it was impossible to know in what amounts these drugs were being administered. The same report revealed that the cost spent on drugs for prisoners in Ireland was almost three times the amount per person outside the prison system, and more than four times the cost per prisoner in English jails.

Brendan O’Donnell’s experience of institutional mental-health care confirms in dramatic detail what Dr Peter Breggin has written about such institutions elsewhere in the world.