Noah Donohoe: Jury must reflect ‘solely on the evidence’ in inquest

The coroner at the Noah Donohoe inquest has told the jury they must exclude several theories from their verdict.

The inquest has been examining 14-year-old Noah’s disappearance and death in north Belfast just over six years ago on 21 June 2020.

The schoolboy was naked at the time.

During a lengthy summing up, which began on Thursday morning, Mr Justice Rooney told the eight men and two women on the jury that their verdict must be based on the evidence they have heard at the inquest and nothing else.

After five months of evidence, he said, their verdict must be based “solely on the evidence you have heard and seen in this court”.

The coroner stressed that there has been no evidence to support some potential findings.

He underlined this by excluding several possibilities.

Rooney told the jury that they are not permitted to find:

The coroner emphasised that there has been no evidence, or not enough evidence, presented at the inquest to support a verdict in line with any of these possibilities or that Noah had suffered an acute mental health experience.

Commenting on some expert evidence which indicated that drugs could degrade and disappear from the system if a body was not found for several days, Rooney told the jury: “that’s not enough” to conclude that there were any drugs in Noah’s system.

He also reminded the jury that there has been no evidence of Noah being assaulted by anyone during his bicycle ride before he went missing, and he said they can’t deliver a verdict stating that he was assaulted by anyone including Daryl Paul, the man who was jailed for stealing the boy’s missing laptop.

The coroner explained that CCTV evidence at the inquest demonstrated that Paul could not have had any interaction with Noah from the time the schoolboy left his south Belfast home until he disappeared at Northwood Road on the other side of the city about twenty-five minutes later.