Mr Justice Weir has had 11 months to reach a verdict on R vs Sean Hoey, having finished hearing evidence in the three-month trial, over which he presided without a jury, in January. But while many, even among the victims' families, doubted the prosecution had made a sufficiently strong case to convict the defendant of the 29 Omagh murders, few expected the judge to issue such an explicit and damning dismissal of the evidence presented to him, the investigation that amassed it, and - perhaps equally significantly - the innovative forensic technique on which part of the prosecution case relied.
Detailing a catalogue of failures - including "mendacious" police officers who were proved to have "beefed up" evidence and then lied in court to cover their tracks, evidence which was lost, misfiled and stored in a "thoroughly disorganised" fashion, expert testimony that was "no more than speculative" and DNA material which had been so amateurishly collected and stored as to be valueless - the judge had no alternative but to acquit Hoey on all counts.
Speculation
"I am acutely aware that the stricken people of Omagh and every other right-thinking member of the Northern Ireland community would very much wish to see whoever was responsible for the outrageous events of August 1998 ... convicted and punished for their crimes according to law," he said.
However, quoting the judge in another trial, he said he also had to bear in mind the "cardinal principle" of the law: "Justice according to law demands proper evidence. By that we mean not merely evidence which might be true and to a considerable extent probably is true, [but which] reaches the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt."
Hoey, a 38-year-old electrician from South Armagh, is not the first to face charges in relation to the bombing. Colm Murphy, his uncle, was jailed in the Republic of Ireland for conspiracy in 2002, though he later had his conviction quashed and awaits a retrial. However, no one else has been charged with murder. The families now believe no one will.
The prosecution case was based on an attempt to link Hoey to Omagh through his alleged involvement in 12 other foiled or unsuccessful Real IRA bomb attacks in the late 1990s. The crown had sought to establish that the timers used in a number of the devices, including at Omagh, had come from the same batch, suggesting that the same person had manufactured the devices. In addition, the prosecution argued, fibres recovered from some of the devices matched others recovered in 2003 from a mobile home parked close to Sean Hoey's house. These devices did not include the timer unit at used at Omagh, which was largely destroyed in the blast.
On both points, the judge was quick to dismiss the quality of the evidence, saying that the suggestion of a single bombmaker was mere speculation, and the fibre evidence did not even weakly connect the defendant to the bomb attempts in question. It was on the third strand of the case, however, that he was most damning. Unable to conceal his astonishment at the evidence he had heard, the judge concluded that the DNA evidence presented to the court did not even warrant consideration, so "thoughtless and slapdash" were the procedures by which it had been collected by PSNI and scenes-of-crime officers.
Protocols in recording the collection of evidence were nonexistent or barely observed, he concluded, while police storage facilities were described as "a complete mess".
Entire vehicles involved in the case - including the car carrying the bomb - had been lost or left to rust, rendering their evidence useless. The judge was damning of the protocols observed at the Forensic Service of Northern Ireland, highlighting how labels routinely fell off items and experts did not wear hats, masks or possibly even gloves while examining evidence. The judge quoted an email from the head of the FSNI relating to a piece of sensitive forensic evidence in which he said: "I don't remember touching anything but who knows."
Two PSNI officers, one of them a detective chief inspector, admitted in court that they had failed to wear protective clothing to collect evidence after one of the attacks, and then lied to pretend that they had. So appalled was the judge by their "deliberate and calculated deception", he said that he had referred their evidence to the police ombudsman.
Compromised
This trial had been keenly anticipated as one of the first major cases to rely on low copy number DNA testing, a British-developed technique that claims to amplify DNA recovered from even a tiny number of cells to the point where it can be analysed. In fact, the judge's ruling made clear, the evidence presented to him was so compromised that it did not warrant consideration on its own terms.
In a highly significant move, however, he was careful to express pointed doubts about the validity of the technique in general in criminal cases, pointing to the lack of scientific consensus on the procedure.
The scientist who invented the procedure, Dr Peter Gill, and a colleague at the forensic science service in Birmingham both gave evidence to the trial defending their techniques. But the judge said he did not accept that two papers published by the pair in scientific journals were enough to validate the procedure.
Referring to a government commitment in 2005 to establish a quality regulator in forensic science, the judge said, "then I consider that the evidence given in this case reinforces in the clearest way possible the need for urgent attention to this task".