Dunlough Bay cocaine smuggler loses appeal
Perry Wharrie, aged 53, received a 30-year prison sentence — the longest handed down for a drugs conviction — for his part in the bungled smuggling of €440m of cocaine at Dunlough Bay, Mizen Head, Co Cork on Jul 2, 2007.
Wharrie and his co-accused were arrested after their rigid inflatable boat carrying 1.5 tonnes of the drug got into trouble off the Cork coast, after a petrol engine was filled with diesel, causing it to sink.
Wharrie, from Loughton in Essex, was found guilty in Jul 2008 at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
Yesterday, Mr Justice John MacMenamin presiding at the Court of Criminal Appeal, sitting with Mr Justice Eamon deValera and Mr Justice Brian McGovern, dismissed Wharrie’s appeal against his conviction.
His appeal against the sentence will be heard at a later date.
Wharrie, who denied the charges, and his two co-accused were jailed for the possession of drugs for sale or supply. Lawyers acting on Wharrie’s behalf claimed his conviction was unsafe and should be set aside. The DPP opposed the appeal.
His lawyers raised a number of grounds in his appeal, including a submission that a Sunday World article by columnist Amanda Brunker published during the trial “interfered” with Wharrie’s defence. Other grounds included that inaccurate material was put before a peace commissioner asked to issue a search warrant in the case, that the trial judge had erred in his charge to the jury, and whether certain CCTV footage should have been replayed to the jury.
In dismissing the appeal the court held the article by Ms Brunker contained a degree of prejudicial comment. However the article was buried deep in the paper and contained no more than “an empty expression of opinion”. Even if the jury had read the article, it did not contain anything that was not before the jury, the appeal court ruled.
In the circumstance the Appeal Court was satisfied to dismiss that and all the other grounds of appeal raised by Wharrie, who in 1989 received a life sentence in connection with the shooting dead of an off-duty police officer in the UK.