A man who was sentenced to death in 1980 for the murder...

A man who was sentenced to death in 1980 for the murder of a garda, but whose conviction was later quashed, has brought a High Court challenge to the legality of the existence of capital punishment at the time of his conviction.
In November 1980 Peter Pringle was convicted of the capital murder of Garda Henry Byrne following a bank robbery the previous July in Ballaghaderreen, Co Mayo, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to one of 40 years' penal servitude.
Pringle served 14 years and 10 months before being freed after the Court of Criminal Appeal in May 1995 found he had established a newly discovered fact which rendered his conviction unsafe and unsatisfactory and quashed the conviction.