A Belfast man whose conviction for possessing an explosive device was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2010 has failed in a High Court challenge against a decision to refuse him a victims' payment. Mr Justice McLaughlin dismissed the judicial review application brought by John Walsh against a ruling of the Victims' Payments Board Appeal Panel, finding that the Panel was entitled to conclude his arrest and detention did not constitute a Troubles-related incident.

Walsh was arrested on 5 June 1991 in an alleyway off the Suffolk Road in the Lenadoon area of Belfast by two soldiers. He was charged with possession of a coffee-jar bomb with intent, convicted by HHJ Petrie on 7 December 1992, and sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. He served seven years before being released in 1998. Following a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction in March 2010, citing fresh fingerprint evidence and revised testimony from one of the arresting soldiers.

Walsh applied for a victims' payment in January 2022 under the Victims' Payments Regulations 2020, describing the relevant incident as his arrest and subsequent seven-year detention, which he characterised as unlawful. He was diagnosed with PTSD and assessed as 21% disabled, with the disablement attributed to the incident. The Board's Panel rejected his application in December 2023, and the Appeal Panel upheld that refusal in May 2025, both concluding that his arrest and imprisonment did not constitute an act of violence or force within the meaning of the scheme.

The central legal question before Mr Justice McLaughlin was whether the arrest and detention could qualify as a Troubles-related incident. The judge interpreted the statutory requirement for an act of violence or force as requiring that the force used must have been unlawful. He held that any arrest or detention relied upon must be shown, on the balance of probabilities, to have been carried out without a proper legal basis.

Walsh argued that forensic science and police records disclosed in 2008 showed that another man, referred to as Mr F, had been arrested 15 minutes before him on suspicion of possessing the same device, and that this demonstrated the soldiers' evidence against him was false. The judge rejected this argument, finding it was not an inevitable inference that Mr F had physically held the device at the time of his arrest. The court noted that police records showed investigators were examining a possible connection between both men, and that the Court of Appeal, when quashing the conviction, had itself made no finding that Walsh had been framed or that the soldiers had been untruthful.

On the legal standard, the judge confirmed that the quashing of a conviction does not, of itself, establish that the original arrest was unlawful. He noted that it was both legally and factually possible for an arrest to be lawful at the time and for a subsequent conviction based on that arrest to later be found unsafe. The Appeal Panel was therefore entitled to find the evidence insufficient to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the arrest and detention had been unlawful.

The judge also addressed Walsh's secondary ground of challenge - that the Appeal Panel had rejected his application for reasons outside the statutory scheme - finding that this ground was dependent on the first and did not arise given his conclusions. Both permitted grounds of challenge were dismissed. The court indicated it would hear the parties on the question of costs.