Gerry Conlon aged 60, RIP
An innocent mawn!
Ah shite. RIP.
WHEN BRITISH JUSTICE FAILED
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/25/magazine/when-british-justice-failed.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
Court No. 2 of the somber Old Bailey Courthouse in London was packed to capacity last Oct. 19. Ranks of wigged lawyers squeezed into the jury box. A hundred reporters crowded the back benches; the public gallery was overflowing - but the courtroom was deathly silent. As the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Lane, finished his summing up, his voice, quiet and restrained, carried to the back of the courtroom: ‘‘These appeals are allowed and the convictions are quashed.’’
For a second there was silence, and then the court erupted. Relatives cheered, the members of the press smiled, the four defendants kissed, whooped and threw carnations across the courtroom. The long, dark nightmare of the Guildford Four was over.
For 15 years, the Guildford Four, three young Irishmen and an English woman, had been imprisoned for horrific acts of terrorism carried out by the Irish Republican Army - two pub bombings, in Guildford and Woolwich, that left seven dead and scores injured. The prison file of one defendant, Paul Hill, was stamped ‘‘Never to be released.’’ All four, the Government has now admitted, were innocent.
Thirty minutes after the court’s decision was announced, one of those Irishmen, 34-year-old Gerard Conlon, walked out the front door of the Old Bailey into a world he had last seen when he was 20.
Outside, a triumphant crowd of Irish construction workers cheered and roared as Conlon proclaimed: ‘‘I’ve been in prison for 15 years for something I didn’t do. I’m totally innocent. I watched my father die in a British prison. He was innocent. The Maguires’’ - seven people jailed in a related case - ‘‘are innocent.’’
The four defendants were convicted, Lord Lane noted, because the police ‘‘lied.’’ Three junior Surrey detectives were immediately suspended, and two retired officers are being investigated. In Parliament, Douglas Hurd, then the Home Secretary, announced an immediate judicial inquiry, to be headed by a retired judge, Sir John May, into the Guildford Four convictions and the Maguire case.
But the Guildford ‘‘lie’’ did not confine itself to a few junior policemen. Like a virus it grew and grew until its corruption tainted the entire British legal system.
The Guildford Four case has now tarnished some of the loftiest legal and police reputations in England. The judge who tried the Guildford Four and the Maguire family, Mr. Justice Donaldson, is now Lord Donaldson, Master of the Rolls - that is, head of the English civil law courts. The prosecutor, Sir Michael Havers (now Lord Havers), was later promoted to Attorney General and eventually became Lord Chancellor - the constitutional head of the British legal system and Speaker in the House of Lords. Peter Imbert, a policeman who played a major role in interrogating the Guildford Four and in capturing the real I.R.A. bombers, today is Sir Peter Imbert and, as Metropolitan Police Commissioner for London, holds the most powerful police post in Britain. ‘‘From the moment the police caught the real I.R.A. bombers, the authorities knew the Guildford Four were innocent,’’ says Chris Mullin, a Labor member of Parliament who has campaigned against other miscarriages of justice. ‘‘In order to obtain and sustain these convictions, the judicial process had to be bent from top to bottom.’’
It started with a bombing. Oct. 5, 1974, was an ordinary Saturday evening in Guildford, a quiet country market town 30 miles southwest of London. The Horse and Groom pub, popular with local soldiers, was crowded with youngsters determined to have a good night out.
At 8:58 P.M. a bomb exploded. Six pounds of high explosive, placed under a seat and detonated by a crude pocket-watch timing mechanism, blasted the bar apart. The front of the building was blown out, the floor collapsed, and the debris rained down on the customers inside, killing 5 and injuring more than 50. Limbs had been ripped off, faces disfigured, flesh set on fire.
It was a shocking outrage. Even as the injured were taken away, the county police force, Surrey Constabulary, began to assemble a detective team to hunt down the bombers. Soon after, a 200-member bomb squad was established. Suspicion immediately fell on the I.R.A.
The police faced a daunting task. The Guildford bombing was the first major act of terrorism and the most serious crime ever committed on the Surrey police’s ‘‘patch.’’ The force had no experience of terrorism and no knowledge of Northern Ireland and the I.R.A. The pressure to prove that it could cope with the investigation was intense.
In the initial phase of the investigation, the police recorded some 4,000 statements, took 600 photographs and interviewed 6,000 people in an effort to determine who had planted the bombs. Officers drew up a minute-by-minute time chart tracing the movements of the pub’s customers. By Oct. 26, three weeks after the bombing, they had narrowed the hunt down to a ‘‘courting couple’’ - the only people in the pub who had not come forward. But faced with conflicting eyewitness descriptions, they were soon at an impasse.
Although the police did not yet know it, Guildford was the opening attack in a new I.R.A. bombing offensive on the mainland, part of a redoubled effort to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. It would be a savage and bitter campaign. Before its members were caught, the ‘‘active service unit’’ sent over by the I.R.A. would be responsible for 19 murders, three kidnappings, nine shootings, 32 bombings and nearly $30 million worth of damage over 14 months. The offenses ranged from a spate of mailbox bombings that brought random terror to London’s streets, to the assassination of Ross McWhirter, publisher of the Guinness Book of World Records - who became a target by offering a reward of $115,000 to ‘‘Beat the Bombers.’’
On Oct. 11, two short-fuse bombs were lobbed through the windows of two gentlemen’s clubs in the West End of London. On Oct. 18, Police Constable Michael Lloyd disturbed the bombers as they tried to steal a car from a London parking garage. The two drew guns on the unarmed policeman, without firing. One of the I.R.A. men stole Lloyd’s watch as a souvenir. The I.R.A. campaign had frightening implications for Britain’s large Irish community. Every Irishman became a potential suspect, and hundreds were arrested, as the police combed their files and canvassed their networks of informers for clues to the identities of the bombers.
Some people did not pay much attention to the terrorist outrages. To the inhabitants of a hippie community squatting in the seedy flats of Kilburn, London’s main Irish district, the I.R.A. campaign could have been taking place on Mars. Stealing to survive, they reserved their energies for drugs and alcohol. In one of those flats lived a 17-year-old English girl, Carole Richardson, and her 24-year-old lover, Patrick Armstrong, a recent acquaintance from Belfast.
By most accounts, Richardson was good-natured but wild. Born into a single-parent family, she was playing truant, dropping LSD, smoking hashish and burglarizing houses at the age of 13. By 15 she was drifting back and forth between the countryside, where she worked as a horse groom, and the excitement of London’s bright lights.
In early September 1974, Richardson met Armstrong at a party in Kilburn and the two moved in together. Armstrong, too, was escaping from his past. He was from the Falls Road in Belfast - caldron of the I.R.A.'s war in Northern Ireland. The Provos - the Provisional I.R.A. - were blowing the city to bits with car bombs, and the Falls district was under military occupation. Virtually every male in the community had either been stopped and questioned or arrested by British troops. Armstrong, mild and meek, was frightened of the soldiers. Even without the troubles - the period of strife that began in 1969 - his life in Belfast did not have much going for it. Ill educated, Armstrong had held a succession of low-pay, no-hope jobs. London offered the prospect of work and the lure of two things he had never really tried before - sex and drugs.
It was a mad, hedonistic phase in Richardson’s and Armstrong’s young lives. One day, wandering about the littered streets of Kilburn, Armstrong bumped into an old school friend from Belfast, Gerry Conlon, accompanied by another distant school acquaintance of Armstrong’s, Paul Hill. The trio had a few drinks together. It was a drinking partnership that would destroy their lives.
On Nov. 7 at 10:17 P.M., seven pounds of explosive studded with bolts were hurled through the plate glass window of the King’s Arms, a pub next to the Royal Artillery barracks in Woolwich, South London. The device exploded in a blinding flash, killing two men and injuring two dozen more.
Paul Hill watched a news bulletin about the bombing as he sat in his uncle’s North London home, 12 miles away. Hill, who had traveled to England with his 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Gina Clarke, had a compelling reason for being in England. He was on the run from the Provisionals.
The Provisionals seriously wanted to ‘‘talk’’ with Hill, either about the misuse of an I.R.A. Armalite rifle or the passing of information to the British security forces. The exact grounds of his offense have never been made clear. I.R.A. spokesmen have always denied he was ever an official member of their organization. But in some way Hill, also born on Falls Road, had been caught up in the fringes of I.R.A. activity.
In England, he reasoned, he would be safe. But as he sat watching news of the I.R.A. attack in Woolwich, his days as a free man were numbered. Someone, somewhere in the security forces in Northern Ireland began to compile a list of potential suspects, and Paul Hill’s name was on it.
On Nov. 21, 1974, a provisional unit, unrelated to the London I.R.A. men, carried out the worst bombing since the beginning of the troubles. Without warning, bombs went off in two crowded pubs in Birmingham, in England’s industrial Midlands. One bomb had been placed in the basement bar of a high-rise office building. In the confined space, the explosion reaped a devastating harvest: 21 killed and 162 injured. As a wave of horror, revulsion and anger swept over England, Irish people were openly attacked in the streets of Birmingham.
That same night, the Birmingham police arrested six Irishmen as they boarded a Belfast-bound ferry in the nearby port of Heysham and obtained confessions. It looked as though the Birmingham bombers had been caught. Yet once out of police custody, the Birmingham Six, as they became known, protested their innocence, claiming that the confessions were a result of severe police beatings. But at the time, their arrests were hailed as a police triumph.
With the I.R.A. seemingly everywhere, a piece of Draconian legislation, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, was rushed through Parliament virtually unopposed, allowing the police to hold and interrogate suspects for seven days without charge.
Hour by hour, pressure on the Surrey Constabulary was mounting. They came for Paul Hill at 11:15 A.M. on Thursday, Nov. 28. Detective Sergeant Anthony Jermey said, ‘‘We’re arresting you on suspicion of causing explosions.’’ Hill replied, ‘‘You’re kidding.’’ They were not. He was among the first to be arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
According to official police records, now discredited by the Court of Appeal, Hill was taken to the Guildford police station and left undisturbed in a cell until Friday evening. At that point, the records claim, police officers merely asked him a couple of questions and he began to ‘‘sing.’’
Fifteen years later, sitting in his aunt’s cozy London home, Paul Hill has a very different recollection of events. ‘‘My holding charge was murder and criminal damage,’’ he says. ''I was amazed. I had a matchbox on me I had got from a public house in Southampton. They said: ‘Is this the next target, you murdering Irish bastard?’ ‘’
‘‘I was petrified,’’ he remembers. ''I had firearms pointed at me. I was told I would be left by the side of the road - shot dead. They put me in a cell where I was spread-eagled, abused, my head was banged against a wall. My girlfriend arrived, she was 17 and she was expecting. That night I was interrogated.
‘‘At one stage they took away my clothes. I was naked but for a pair of handcuffs. I was shown pictures of bodies in the mortuary. I was brutalized and threatened. I was dragged around the police station by my hair. One of the people who joined in the beating was head of the bomb squad - who helped beat me down a flight of stairs. I had not a lucid thought in my head.’’
Hill’s ‘‘confession’’ still haunts him. Threatened that his girlfriend would be arrested for the bombings, he broke and began to name names - any names. ‘‘All right, I will tell you all I know,’’ the police account begins.
Hill listed everybody he knew in London: Conlon and Armstrong; ‘‘Marion,’’ who supposedly taught him how to make bombs; an ‘‘old bird’’ who had gone on the Guildford bombing mission; occupants of a flat he once visited; Catholic priests and Conlon’s relatives. (Hill also confessed to the murder of Brian Shaw, a former British Army soldier killed in July.) Within 24 hours, almost everyone on the list was arrested.
Conlon was arrested in Belfast the next morning, Saturday, Nov. 30, and held until Sunday evening, when he was flown to London. In the station, Conlon claims, he was given a severe beating by Royal Ulster Constabulary officers. When Conlon’s father, Guiseppe, tried to see him, he was rebuffed.
Despite his recurrent tuberculosis, Guiseppe (the name, but not the odd spelling, came from an Italian godfather) decided to follow his son to England and make sure he got a good solicitor. He made plans to stay at the home of his brother-in-law, Paddy Maguire. It was a decision that drew him, and the entire Maguire family, into the center of the maelstrom unleashed by Paul Hill’s confession.
In Guildford, Conlon says, he was again beaten by members of the Surrey interrogation team, threatened at gunpoint, deprived of sleep for the full seven-day interrogation period. He was given tea with urine in it and spit-covered food. ‘‘The police went wild,’’ he says, anger rising in his voice. ‘‘I thought they were going to kill me. I thought I would never get out of that police station alive.’’ Finally, Conlon says, the officers made threats against his family. ‘‘Policemen threatened to phone up Belfast to get my mother ‘sorted out’ - killed. My family sorted out. To me, signing the confession was nothing if it was going to get the pressure off my family. I signed it.’’
By the time Conlon confessed, Hill had implicated himself and Paddy Armstrong in the Woolwich bombing. Then on the afternoon of Dec. 3, according to now-discredited police notes, he said that ‘‘Marion’’ was Carole Richardson and that the ‘‘old bird’’ on the Guildford bombing mission was Conlon’s aunt, 39-year-old Annie Maguire, who ran their ‘‘bomb factory.’’
That evening, the police arrested the entire Maguire household: Annie Maguire; her husband, Paddy, 41; her brother, Shaun Smyth, 36; her sons Vincent, 16, and Patrick, 13; a family friend, Pat O’Neill, 34; and Guiseppe Conlon, 52 - who had arrived from Belfast that morning. The hands of all seven were tested for contact with explosives and found to have positive traces, but no evidence of explosives was ever found in the house - one of the great mysteries of the case.
In Guildford, both Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson, who had been popping pills for three days when they were arrested, broke rapidly in police custody. Armstrong implicated himself and Richardson in the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. Informed of his betrayal, Richardson in turn betrayed him. Both confessed to being the ‘‘courting couple’’ who had planted the Guildford bomb.
After seven days the suspects were allowed to see solicitors, and the confessions stopped. From that point, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven vehemently and unwaveringly protested their innocence.
The arrests were seen as a triumph for the Surrey and Metropolitan police forces. Officially, they had caught the Guildford and Woolwich bombers and uncovered what the tabloid headlines called ‘‘Aunt Annie’s bomb factory’’ at the Maguires’.
Only the I.R.A. remained unimpressed. The shootings and bombings continued. On Nov. 30, two days after Hill’s arrest, the I.R.A. unit threw a bolt-studded bomb through the window of the Talbot Arms, a pub in the Chelsea district of London. It failed to explode, yielding the first fingerprint clues to the terrorists. Forensic scientists said it was a carbon copy of the Woolwich bomb. On Dec. 20 a time bomb, identical to the Guildford bomb, was discovered on a train station platform in the military garrison town of Aldershot. The I.R.A. had intended to kill soldiers returning home for Christmas by train. After being defused, it was found to have the fingerprints of the Talbot Arms terrorists on it.
In February 1975, the police had their first major breakthrough. Officers on a routine patrol spotted a man acting suspiciously near a basement flat at 39 Fairholme Road in West London. When the officers tried to question him, he ran away. A passing off-duty policeman, 21-year-old Stephen Tibble, gave chase until the ‘‘burglar’’ pulled out a Colt .38, shot him at point-blank range and fled.
When the police broke down the door at Fairholme Road they found themselves inside an I.R.A. safe house. They discovered guns, wires, batteries, detonators and watches that matched those found on the unexploded Talbot Arms device and on the Aldershot time bomb - everything except a link with the four defendants charged with the Guildford bombings. The net was slowly closing around the I.R.A. unit. The Guildford Four spent Christmas in jail awaiting trial. Richardson’s letters from that time reveal her bewilderment and anger: ''Jesus Paddy what have you got me involved in. . . . How could Paul Hill make statements against me. I don’t even know the guy.
At other times she berated her boyfriend for his lack of faith in the legal system she was certain would clear their names. ‘‘It’s Guildford detectives that haven’t got their heads screwed the right way round. Not BRITISH JUSTICE, that doesn’t come into it until the trial.’’
The trial of the Guildford four opened on Sept. 16, 1975, in Courtroom No. 2 at the Old Bailey. It was little more than a formality. With no eyewitnesses or forensic evidence against the four, the battleground was the disputed confessions. The crown prosecution, led by Sir Michael Havers, Queen’s Counsel, dismissed the more than 100 inconsistencies they contained. It was all part of an elaborate I.R.A. counterinterrogation technique, Havers told the court. (Years later it emerged that alibis placing Conlon and Richardson away from the crime scene had been altered or hidden in police files.) The defense attacked the confessions, claiming they had been obtained through police beatings. But the members of the police investigation team stuck to their story, adamantly denying any use of force or or intimidation.
The verdict was guilty. Mr. Justice Donaldson, bewigged and dressed in a scarlet robe, summoned up all the authority of his office to denounce the defendants’ crimes and lament the fact that Britain had abolished capital punishment. If hanging were an option, he told the three men, ‘‘you would have been executed.’’ Conlon was sentenced to 30 years and Armstrong 35 years. Richardson was given an indeterminate sentence because of her age at the time of the offense. Paul Hill, then 21, was given the longest sentence ever handed out in a British court - the equivalent of life without parole. ‘‘If as an act of mercy you are ever to be released,’’ the judge said, ‘‘it will only be on account of great age or infirmity.’’
Four months later, the Maguire Seven went on trial. Facing the same judge, Mr. Justice Donaldson, and the same prosecutor, Sir Michael Havers, as the Guildford Four had, they were convicted of handling explosives.
The adult Maguire defendants were given 14-year and 12-year sentences. Vincent received five years and Patrick four years. Guiseppe Conlon was sentenced to life - he died in prison. Surrey’s Chief Constable, Peter Matthews, announced that he was pleased with the verdicts. ‘‘We have cut off a major pipeline to the terrorists,’’ he said. ‘‘We are only sorry we did not find the bombs.’’
Even before the end of the Guildford Four trial, the I.R.A. unit returned to the offensive. In a daring attack, it time-bombed another soldiers’ pub in Surrey on Aug. 27, 1975. On Nov. 12 it threw a bomb through the window of Scott’s Oyster Bar in the West End of London, killing a diner.
But the I.R.A. men were growing increasingly reckless. The team had already lost its leader, 25-year-old Brendan Dowd - captured on July 10 while setting up a new I.R.A. unit in Manchester. Wrapped around his wrist was police constable Michael Lloyd’s watch, and his fingerprints matched those inside the safe house on Fairholme Road.
Since the discovery of the safe house in February 1975, the police had been building a detailed picture of the activities of the I.R.A. and the forensic links between their attacks. Dowd’s capture filled in a huge part of the puzzle.
Yet none of this crucial evidence would appear at the Guildford Four trial in September - in fact, the defense team would not hear of it for another year. The Guildford and Woolwich bombings were treated by the prosecution as terrorist acts unrelated to any other bombing, and the expert witnesses who explained the timing mechanism made no reference to other attacks. At his trial in May 1976, Dowd was not charged with any of the London offenses.
On Dec. 6, 1975, the remaining four members of the I.R.A. unit returned to Scott’s Oyster Bar to shoot it up. It was a foolish decision. Since Nov. 27, Scotland Yard had flooded the West End with 800 unarmed plainclothes officers.
At 9 P.M. that Saturday two officers spotted the gunmen when they fired two shots into the restaurant. The trap snapped shut. After a wild chase through central London, first by car, then on foot, the police cornered the suspects in an apartment building on Balcombe Street. There the gunmen took a middle-aged couple hostage, finally giving up after a five-day siege. They were taken to a high-security police station - the beginning of a lifetime in prison. But when Peter Imbert, a senior member of the Scotland Yard Bomb Squad, began to interrogate them, he heard some disquieting comments, recorded in police notes and later obtained under court order by the Guildford Four defense.
‘‘My first job? You’ve already got someone for that,’’ said one of the men, explaining that he had been on the Woolwich bomb team. Asked about Armstrong and Hill he replied, ‘‘Never heard of them.’’
When questioned by Imbert, 22-year-old Joseph O’Connell, who had succeeded Brendan Dowd as the leader of the unit, admitted he had carried out the Woolwich and Guildford bombings with Dowd but said he wasn’t prepared to talk. ‘‘It won’t do any good,’’ he said. The key confession came from Dowd: he admitted being the male part of the ‘‘courting couple’’ who planted the Horse and Groom bomb. Dowd recalled details about two of the pub’s other customers, two old men with shopping bags, that had never been revealed in public.
On Jan. 24, 1977, the ‘‘Balcombe Street unit’’ went on trial. Originally the four defendants had been accused of 144 separate charges. By the trial the indictment was reduced to 100. Charges relating to the period from August to December 1974, before the Guildford Four arrests, were dropped.
O’Connell immediately called attention to the strange omissions on the charge sheet. In the tradition of Irish Republicanism, he refused to recognize the court, but added: ‘‘I refuse to plead because the indictment does not include two charges concerning the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. I took part in both, for which innocent people have been convicted.’’
It was a bizarre trial. The I.R.A. men instructed defense counsel to attack prosecution witnesses in a bid to uncover evidence of their own involvement in the Guildford and Woolwich attacks. During cross-examination a forensic scientist, Douglas Higgs, who had examined the pattern of throw-bomb attacks, admitted he had changed his original statement at the request of the police. His first statement had linked Woolwich to all the other attacks, which had taken place when the Guildford Four were already in police custody. His second statement - the one given to the court - omitted any reference to the Woolwich attack.
The point was crucial. If the same people using the same materials and same methods had carried out the Woolwich and the Talbot Arms attacks, then the Guildford Four had to be innocent. Paul Hill was safely behind bars when the Talbot Arms was bombed on Nov. 30, 1974. And the same held for the Guildford time bomb and the one discovered at Aldershot train station - when the Guildford Four were in custody.
Under cross-examination, James Nevill, commander of the Scotland Yard Bomb Squad, admitted that the police had been instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Norman Skelhorn, to tell the scientists to remove from their evidence all references to Woolwich and Guildford. But the judge, Mr. Justice Cantley, barred further questioning about the Guildford bombing as irrelevant.
The jury found the I.R.A. men guilty. But armed with the evidence from the Balcombe Street unit, the Guildford Four went to the Court of Appeal. The appeal opened on Oct. 10, 1977, under Lord Roskill, who had already turned down an appeal by the Maguires.
For Alastair Logan, solicitor for the defendants, the Appeal Court was a legal charade. ‘‘The judges could not bring themselves to believe that terrorists could tell the truth and the police could tell lies,’’ he says. ‘‘I got the distinct impression that the final judgment was written beforehand. The answer was no, and the judges worked back to find how they could get there. It was such an intellectually dishonest exercise I do not believe anyone reading it today could believe it was an honest judgement.’’
In an highly unusual move, given the seriousness of the case (a move later denounced by two other British law lords), the three Appeal Court judges refused to allow a retrial before a jury. Instead, they would hear and rule on the fresh evidence themselves. The prosecution was led by Sir Michael Havers.
The judges decided that the Balcombe Street unit had acted in concert with the Guildford Four. Any inconsistencies between the two sets of confessions were dismissed as part of a ‘‘skillful and cunning attempt’’ by the I.R.A. unit to deceive the court and free their fellow terrorists. The Guildford Four convictions stood.
It was over. Every legal Mavenue had been exhausted. The prisoners’ supporters were hurled into a decade of futile protest.
But the case did not die, largely due to the efforts of Sister Sarah Clarke, an Irish nun living in London, Paul Hill’s family and, most important, defense solicitor Alastair Logan, who for 15 years never let slip an opportunity to prove the innocence of the Guildford Four.
The grimmest moment of the campaign came in January 1980. Manacled to police officers armed with pump-action shotguns, Gerard Conlon was taken to see his dying father at a London hospital. Before his arrest Guiseppe had been an invalid. In prison his condition worsened.
‘‘I will never forget my father lying there,’’ Conlon recalls, ‘‘surrounded by police officers with tubes in his arm, an oxygen mask on, and then him ripping it off and saying to the police, the Catholic Church, the Home Office officials, the politicians who were there: ‘I am an innocent man. I am dying. Oh, look at me.’ Every single one of them with the exception of little Sister Sarah dropped their heads. Not one of them could look my father in the eye.’’ Five days later Guiseppe Conlon was dead.
His death marked a turning point in the campaign. His tuberculosis, so severe that he could hardly walk, made Guiseppe Conlon a most unlikely terrorist. Gradually, a motley assortment of political allies - Sir John Biggs-Davidson, a Conservative M.P.; Gerry Fitt, a Catholic M.P. from Belfast, and Basil Cardinal Hume, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England - became convinced of his innocence and called on the Home Secretary to reopen the case. As memories of the horror of Guildford and Birmingham faded, journalists, too, began taking a second look. Politics played a part as well. The cases were raised in meetings to hammer out the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed in late 1985. The Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is said to have brought up the cases with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Pressure for a new appeal hearing built, and on Aug. 14, 1987, Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, announced that a separate police force, Avon and Somerset, would investigate the Guildford case. By May 1989, the investigators had discovered that the Surrey police had fabricated Armstrong’s confession. The handwritten ‘‘contemporaneous notes’’ that British police must take during interrogations turned out to be copied from a typescript that had been distributed to several officers as a model.
Since the only evidence against the Guildford Four was confessional, any doubt about its origins had catastrophic consequences for the crown case. ‘‘If the police were prepared to tell this sort of lie,’’ Lord Lane later said when quashing the convictions, ‘‘then the whole of their evidence became suspect. On their evidence depended the prosecution case.’’ Upon receiving the report of the Avon and Somerset police, the Director of Public Prosecutions informed the Home Secretary, and an emergency Court of Appeal hearing was called for Oct. 19, 1989, to free the Guildford Four.
The spotlight now turns on the Birmingham Six, who are still serving life sentences and whose convictions were upheld in 1988 by the Court of Appeal. The new Home Secretary, David Waddington, has been presented with fresh evidence but has yet to reopen the case. Meanwhile, the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, which made the arrests, has been disbanded after officers were charged with corruption and fabricating evidence in later cases. The police forensic scientist who testified that he found traces of nitroglycerine on the hands of the defendants was recently retired on grounds of ‘‘limited efficiency.’’ The case is now being examined by the United States Congress and the European Parliament.
For the Guildford Four, there is no epilogue yet. The Government has paid out interim damages of $15,000 to Hill (who is free pending his appeal of the Brian Shaw conviction) and $75,000 to Armstrong, Conlon and Richardson. The criminal investigation into the activities of the Surrey police continues. But the judicial inquiry headed by Sir John May will not report until 1992. Legal scholars and editorial commentators have urged a substantial reform of the British legal system: at the least, a new, more independent Court of Appeal; if possible, the adoption of a Bill of Rights to safeguard individual liberties.
‘‘The thing that surprises most people outside England is that we have no written constitution and that concepts like the right to silence, which were developed here and have borne fruit in other constitutions, were never formalized,’’ says Gareth Peirce, lawyer for Gerard Conlon and the Birmingham Six. ‘‘When the authorities feel under threat, those concepts are easily violated because nobody knows exactly what their rights are.’’
‘‘The really frightening thing about the Guildford Four case,’’ she says, ‘‘is that something similar could happen again tomorrow.’’
A quarter of his life spent in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. 
RIP.
Great read. Good stuff Rocko.
What happened ? Was he in bad health ?
Sad news
RIP
It was reported this morning that he had a lengthy illness, it wasn’t stated what the illness was
RIP
What was done to them all was staggering in its callousness.
[QUOTE=“Rocko, post: 967537, member: 1”]WHEN BRITISH JUSTICE FAILED
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/25/magazine/when-british-justice-failed.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
Court No. 2 of the somber Old Bailey Courthouse in London was packed to capacity last Oct. 19. Ranks of wigged lawyers squeezed into the jury box. A hundred reporters crowded the back benches; the public gallery was overflowing - but the courtroom was deathly silent. As the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Lane, finished his summing up, his voice, quiet and restrained, carried to the back of the courtroom: ‘‘These appeals are allowed and the convictions are quashed.’’
For a second there was silence, and then the court erupted. Relatives cheered, the members of the press smiled, the four defendants kissed, whooped and threw carnations across the courtroom. The long, dark nightmare of the Guildford Four was over.
For 15 years, the Guildford Four, three young Irishmen and an English woman, had been imprisoned for horrific acts of terrorism carried out by the Irish Republican Army - two pub bombings, in Guildford and Woolwich, that left seven dead and scores injured. The prison file of one defendant, Paul Hill, was stamped ‘‘Never to be released.’’ All four, the Government has now admitted, were innocent.
Thirty minutes after the court’s decision was announced, one of those Irishmen, 34-year-old Gerard Conlon, walked out the front door of the Old Bailey into a world he had last seen when he was 20.
Outside, a triumphant crowd of Irish construction workers cheered and roared as Conlon proclaimed: ‘‘I’ve been in prison for 15 years for something I didn’t do. I’m totally innocent. I watched my father die in a British prison. He was innocent. The Maguires’’ - seven people jailed in a related case - ‘‘are innocent.’’
The four defendants were convicted, Lord Lane noted, because the police ‘‘lied.’’ Three junior Surrey detectives were immediately suspended, and two retired officers are being investigated. In Parliament, Douglas Hurd, then the Home Secretary, announced an immediate judicial inquiry, to be headed by a retired judge, Sir John May, into the Guildford Four convictions and the Maguire case.
But the Guildford ‘‘lie’’ did not confine itself to a few junior policemen. Like a virus it grew and grew until its corruption tainted the entire British legal system.
The Guildford Four case has now tarnished some of the loftiest legal and police reputations in England. The judge who tried the Guildford Four and the Maguire family, Mr. Justice Donaldson, is now Lord Donaldson, Master of the Rolls - that is, head of the English civil law courts. The prosecutor, Sir Michael Havers (now Lord Havers), was later promoted to Attorney General and eventually became Lord Chancellor - the constitutional head of the British legal system and Speaker in the House of Lords. Peter Imbert, a policeman who played a major role in interrogating the Guildford Four and in capturing the real I.R.A. bombers, today is Sir Peter Imbert and, as Metropolitan Police Commissioner for London, holds the most powerful police post in Britain. ‘‘From the moment the police caught the real I.R.A. bombers, the authorities knew the Guildford Four were innocent,’’ says Chris Mullin, a Labor member of Parliament who has campaigned against other miscarriages of justice. ‘‘In order to obtain and sustain these convictions, the judicial process had to be bent from top to bottom.’’
It started with a bombing. Oct. 5, 1974, was an ordinary Saturday evening in Guildford, a quiet country market town 30 miles southwest of London. The Horse and Groom pub, popular with local soldiers, was crowded with youngsters determined to have a good night out.
At 8:58 P.M. a bomb exploded. Six pounds of high explosive, placed under a seat and detonated by a crude pocket-watch timing mechanism, blasted the bar apart. The front of the building was blown out, the floor collapsed, and the debris rained down on the customers inside, killing 5 and injuring more than 50. Limbs had been ripped off, faces disfigured, flesh set on fire.
It was a shocking outrage. Even as the injured were taken away, the county police force, Surrey Constabulary, began to assemble a detective team to hunt down the bombers. Soon after, a 200-member bomb squad was established. Suspicion immediately fell on the I.R.A.
The police faced a daunting task. The Guildford bombing was the first major act of terrorism and the most serious crime ever committed on the Surrey police’s ‘‘patch.’’ The force had no experience of terrorism and no knowledge of Northern Ireland and the I.R.A. The pressure to prove that it could cope with the investigation was intense.
In the initial phase of the investigation, the police recorded some 4,000 statements, took 600 photographs and interviewed 6,000 people in an effort to determine who had planted the bombs. Officers drew up a minute-by-minute time chart tracing the movements of the pub’s customers. By Oct. 26, three weeks after the bombing, they had narrowed the hunt down to a ‘‘courting couple’’ - the only people in the pub who had not come forward. But faced with conflicting eyewitness descriptions, they were soon at an impasse.
Although the police did not yet know it, Guildford was the opening attack in a new I.R.A. bombing offensive on the mainland, part of a redoubled effort to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. It would be a savage and bitter campaign. Before its members were caught, the ‘‘active service unit’’ sent over by the I.R.A. would be responsible for 19 murders, three kidnappings, nine shootings, 32 bombings and nearly $30 million worth of damage over 14 months. The offenses ranged from a spate of mailbox bombings that brought random terror to London’s streets, to the assassination of Ross McWhirter, publisher of the Guinness Book of World Records - who became a target by offering a reward of $115,000 to ‘‘Beat the Bombers.’’
On Oct. 11, two short-fuse bombs were lobbed through the windows of two gentlemen’s clubs in the West End of London. On Oct. 18, Police Constable Michael Lloyd disturbed the bombers as they tried to steal a car from a London parking garage. The two drew guns on the unarmed policeman, without firing. One of the I.R.A. men stole Lloyd’s watch as a souvenir. The I.R.A. campaign had frightening implications for Britain’s large Irish community. Every Irishman became a potential suspect, and hundreds were arrested, as the police combed their files and canvassed their networks of informers for clues to the identities of the bombers.
Some people did not pay much attention to the terrorist outrages. To the inhabitants of a hippie community squatting in the seedy flats of Kilburn, London’s main Irish district, the I.R.A. campaign could have been taking place on Mars. Stealing to survive, they reserved their energies for drugs and alcohol. In one of those flats lived a 17-year-old English girl, Carole Richardson, and her 24-year-old lover, Patrick Armstrong, a recent acquaintance from Belfast.
By most accounts, Richardson was good-natured but wild. Born into a single-parent family, she was playing truant, dropping LSD, smoking hashish and burglarizing houses at the age of 13. By 15 she was drifting back and forth between the countryside, where she worked as a horse groom, and the excitement of London’s bright lights.
In early September 1974, Richardson met Armstrong at a party in Kilburn and the two moved in together. Armstrong, too, was escaping from his past. He was from the Falls Road in Belfast - caldron of the I.R.A.'s war in Northern Ireland. The Provos - the Provisional I.R.A. - were blowing the city to bits with car bombs, and the Falls district was under military occupation. Virtually every male in the community had either been stopped and questioned or arrested by British troops. Armstrong, mild and meek, was frightened of the soldiers. Even without the troubles - the period of strife that began in 1969 - his life in Belfast did not have much going for it. Ill educated, Armstrong had held a succession of low-pay, no-hope jobs. London offered the prospect of work and the lure of two things he had never really tried before - sex and drugs.
It was a mad, hedonistic phase in Richardson’s and Armstrong’s young lives. One day, wandering about the littered streets of Kilburn, Armstrong bumped into an old school friend from Belfast, Gerry Conlon, accompanied by another distant school acquaintance of Armstrong’s, Paul Hill. The trio had a few drinks together. It was a drinking partnership that would destroy their lives.
On Nov. 7 at 10:17 P.M., seven pounds of explosive studded with bolts were hurled through the plate glass window of the King’s Arms, a pub next to the Royal Artillery barracks in Woolwich, South London. The device exploded in a blinding flash, killing two men and injuring two dozen more.
Paul Hill watched a news bulletin about the bombing as he sat in his uncle’s North London home, 12 miles away. Hill, who had traveled to England with his 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Gina Clarke, had a compelling reason for being in England. He was on the run from the Provisionals.
The Provisionals seriously wanted to ‘‘talk’’ with Hill, either about the misuse of an I.R.A. Armalite rifle or the passing of information to the British security forces. The exact grounds of his offense have never been made clear. I.R.A. spokesmen have always denied he was ever an official member of their organization. But in some way Hill, also born on Falls Road, had been caught up in the fringes of I.R.A. activity.
In England, he reasoned, he would be safe. But as he sat watching news of the I.R.A. attack in Woolwich, his days as a free man were numbered. Someone, somewhere in the security forces in Northern Ireland began to compile a list of potential suspects, and Paul Hill’s name was on it.
On Nov. 21, 1974, a provisional unit, unrelated to the London I.R.A. men, carried out the worst bombing since the beginning of the troubles. Without warning, bombs went off in two crowded pubs in Birmingham, in England’s industrial Midlands. One bomb had been placed in the basement bar of a high-rise office building. In the confined space, the explosion reaped a devastating harvest: 21 killed and 162 injured. As a wave of horror, revulsion and anger swept over England, Irish people were openly attacked in the streets of Birmingham.
That same night, the Birmingham police arrested six Irishmen as they boarded a Belfast-bound ferry in the nearby port of Heysham and obtained confessions. It looked as though the Birmingham bombers had been caught. Yet once out of police custody, the Birmingham Six, as they became known, protested their innocence, claiming that the confessions were a result of severe police beatings. But at the time, their arrests were hailed as a police triumph.
With the I.R.A. seemingly everywhere, a piece of Draconian legislation, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, was rushed through Parliament virtually unopposed, allowing the police to hold and interrogate suspects for seven days without charge.
Hour by hour, pressure on the Surrey Constabulary was mounting. They came for Paul Hill at 11:15 A.M. on Thursday, Nov. 28. Detective Sergeant Anthony Jermey said, ‘‘We’re arresting you on suspicion of causing explosions.’’ Hill replied, ‘‘You’re kidding.’’ They were not. He was among the first to be arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
According to official police records, now discredited by the Court of Appeal, Hill was taken to the Guildford police station and left undisturbed in a cell until Friday evening. At that point, the records claim, police officers merely asked him a couple of questions and he began to ‘‘sing.’’
Fifteen years later, sitting in his aunt’s cozy London home, Paul Hill has a very different recollection of events. ‘‘My holding charge was murder and criminal damage,’’ he says. ''I was amazed. I had a matchbox on me I had got from a public house in Southampton. They said: ‘Is this the next target, you murdering Irish bastard?’ ‘’
‘‘I was petrified,’’ he remembers. ''I had firearms pointed at me. I was told I would be left by the side of the road - shot dead. They put me in a cell where I was spread-eagled, abused, my head was banged against a wall. My girlfriend arrived, she was 17 and she was expecting. That night I was interrogated.
‘‘At one stage they took away my clothes. I was naked but for a pair of handcuffs. I was shown pictures of bodies in the mortuary. I was brutalized and threatened. I was dragged around the police station by my hair. One of the people who joined in the beating was head of the bomb squad - who helped beat me down a flight of stairs. I had not a lucid thought in my head.’’
Hill’s ‘‘confession’’ still haunts him. Threatened that his girlfriend would be arrested for the bombings, he broke and began to name names - any names. ‘‘All right, I will tell you all I know,’’ the police account begins.
Hill listed everybody he knew in London: Conlon and Armstrong; ‘‘Marion,’’ who supposedly taught him how to make bombs; an ‘‘old bird’’ who had gone on the Guildford bombing mission; occupants of a flat he once visited; Catholic priests and Conlon’s relatives. (Hill also confessed to the murder of Brian Shaw, a former British Army soldier killed in July.) Within 24 hours, almost everyone on the list was arrested.
Conlon was arrested in Belfast the next morning, Saturday, Nov. 30, and held until Sunday evening, when he was flown to London. In the station, Conlon claims, he was given a severe beating by Royal Ulster Constabulary officers. When Conlon’s father, Guiseppe, tried to see him, he was rebuffed.
Despite his recurrent tuberculosis, Guiseppe (the name, but not the odd spelling, came from an Italian godfather) decided to follow his son to England and make sure he got a good solicitor. He made plans to stay at the home of his brother-in-law, Paddy Maguire. It was a decision that drew him, and the entire Maguire family, into the center of the maelstrom unleashed by Paul Hill’s confession.
In Guildford, Conlon says, he was again beaten by members of the Surrey interrogation team, threatened at gunpoint, deprived of sleep for the full seven-day interrogation period. He was given tea with urine in it and spit-covered food. ‘‘The police went wild,’’ he says, anger rising in his voice. ‘‘I thought they were going to kill me. I thought I would never get out of that police station alive.’’ Finally, Conlon says, the officers made threats against his family. ‘‘Policemen threatened to phone up Belfast to get my mother ‘sorted out’ - killed. My family sorted out. To me, signing the confession was nothing if it was going to get the pressure off my family. I signed it.’’
By the time Conlon confessed, Hill had implicated himself and Paddy Armstrong in the Woolwich bombing. Then on the afternoon of Dec. 3, according to now-discredited police notes, he said that ‘‘Marion’’ was Carole Richardson and that the ‘‘old bird’’ on the Guildford bombing mission was Conlon’s aunt, 39-year-old Annie Maguire, who ran their ‘‘bomb factory.’’
That evening, the police arrested the entire Maguire household: Annie Maguire; her husband, Paddy, 41; her brother, Shaun Smyth, 36; her sons Vincent, 16, and Patrick, 13; a family friend, Pat O’Neill, 34; and Guiseppe Conlon, 52 - who had arrived from Belfast that morning. The hands of all seven were tested for contact with explosives and found to have positive traces, but no evidence of explosives was ever found in the house - one of the great mysteries of the case.
In Guildford, both Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson, who had been popping pills for three days when they were arrested, broke rapidly in police custody. Armstrong implicated himself and Richardson in the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. Informed of his betrayal, Richardson in turn betrayed him. Both confessed to being the ‘‘courting couple’’ who had planted the Guildford bomb.
After seven days the suspects were allowed to see solicitors, and the confessions stopped. From that point, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven vehemently and unwaveringly protested their innocence.
The arrests were seen as a triumph for the Surrey and Metropolitan police forces. Officially, they had caught the Guildford and Woolwich bombers and uncovered what the tabloid headlines called ‘‘Aunt Annie’s bomb factory’’ at the Maguires’.
Only the I.R.A. remained unimpressed. The shootings and bombings continued. On Nov. 30, two days after Hill’s arrest, the I.R.A. unit threw a bolt-studded bomb through the window of the Talbot Arms, a pub in the Chelsea district of London. It failed to explode, yielding the first fingerprint clues to the terrorists. Forensic scientists said it was a carbon copy of the Woolwich bomb. On Dec. 20 a time bomb, identical to the Guildford bomb, was discovered on a train station platform in the military garrison town of Aldershot. The I.R.A. had intended to kill soldiers returning home for Christmas by train. After being defused, it was found to have the fingerprints of the Talbot Arms terrorists on it.
In February 1975, the police had their first major breakthrough. Officers on a routine patrol spotted a man acting suspiciously near a basement flat at 39 Fairholme Road in West London. When the officers tried to question him, he ran away. A passing off-duty policeman, 21-year-old Stephen Tibble, gave chase until the ‘‘burglar’’ pulled out a Colt .38, shot him at point-blank range and fled.
When the police broke down the door at Fairholme Road they found themselves inside an I.R.A. safe house. They discovered guns, wires, batteries, detonators and watches that matched those found on the unexploded Talbot Arms device and on the Aldershot time bomb - everything except a link with the four defendants charged with the Guildford bombings. The net was slowly closing around the I.R.A. unit. The Guildford Four spent Christmas in jail awaiting trial. Richardson’s letters from that time reveal her bewilderment and anger: ''Jesus Paddy what have you got me involved in. . . . How could Paul Hill make statements against me. I don’t even know the guy.
At other times she berated her boyfriend for his lack of faith in the legal system she was certain would clear their names. ‘‘It’s Guildford detectives that haven’t got their heads screwed the right way round. Not BRITISH JUSTICE, that doesn’t come into it until the trial.’’
The trial of the Guildford four opened on Sept. 16, 1975, in Courtroom No. 2 at the Old Bailey. It was little more than a formality. With no eyewitnesses or forensic evidence against the four, the battleground was the disputed confessions. The crown prosecution, led by Sir Michael Havers, Queen’s Counsel, dismissed the more than 100 inconsistencies they contained. It was all part of an elaborate I.R.A. counterinterrogation technique, Havers told the court. (Years later it emerged that alibis placing Conlon and Richardson away from the crime scene had been altered or hidden in police files.) The defense attacked the confessions, claiming they had been obtained through police beatings. But the members of the police investigation team stuck to their story, adamantly denying any use of force or or intimidation.
The verdict was guilty. Mr. Justice Donaldson, bewigged and dressed in a scarlet robe, summoned up all the authority of his office to denounce the defendants’ crimes and lament the fact that Britain had abolished capital punishment. If hanging were an option, he told the three men, ‘‘you would have been executed.’’ Conlon was sentenced to 30 years and Armstrong 35 years. Richardson was given an indeterminate sentence because of her age at the time of the offense. Paul Hill, then 21, was given the longest sentence ever handed out in a British court - the equivalent of life without parole. ‘‘If as an act of mercy you are ever to be released,’’ the judge said, ‘‘it will only be on account of great age or infirmity.’’
Four months later, the Maguire Seven went on trial. Facing the same judge, Mr. Justice Donaldson, and the same prosecutor, Sir Michael Havers, as the Guildford Four had, they were convicted of handling explosives.
The adult Maguire defendants were given 14-year and 12-year sentences. Vincent received five years and Patrick four years. Guiseppe Conlon was sentenced to life - he died in prison. Surrey’s Chief Constable, Peter Matthews, announced that he was pleased with the verdicts. ‘‘We have cut off a major pipeline to the terrorists,’’ he said. ‘‘We are only sorry we did not find the bombs.’’
Even before the end of the Guildford Four trial, the I.R.A. unit returned to the offensive. In a daring attack, it time-bombed another soldiers’ pub in Surrey on Aug. 27, 1975. On Nov. 12 it threw a bomb through the window of Scott’s Oyster Bar in the West End of London, killing a diner.
But the I.R.A. men were growing increasingly reckless. The team had already lost its leader, 25-year-old Brendan Dowd - captured on July 10 while setting up a new I.R.A. unit in Manchester. Wrapped around his wrist was police constable Michael Lloyd’s watch, and his fingerprints matched those inside the safe house on Fairholme Road.
Since the discovery of the safe house in February 1975, the police had been building a detailed picture of the activities of the I.R.A. and the forensic links between their attacks. Dowd’s capture filled in a huge part of the puzzle.
Yet none of this crucial evidence would appear at the Guildford Four trial in September - in fact, the defense team would not hear of it for another year. The Guildford and Woolwich bombings were treated by the prosecution as terrorist acts unrelated to any other bombing, and the expert witnesses who explained the timing mechanism made no reference to other attacks. At his trial in May 1976, Dowd was not charged with any of the London offenses.
On Dec. 6, 1975, the remaining four members of the I.R.A. unit returned to Scott’s Oyster Bar to shoot it up. It was a foolish decision. Since Nov. 27, Scotland Yard had flooded the West End with 800 unarmed plainclothes officers.
At 9 P.M. that Saturday two officers spotted the gunmen when they fired two shots into the restaurant. The trap snapped shut. After a wild chase through central London, first by car, then on foot, the police cornered the suspects in an apartment building on Balcombe Street. There the gunmen took a middle-aged couple hostage, finally giving up after a five-day siege. They were taken to a high-security police station - the beginning of a lifetime in prison. But when Peter Imbert, a senior member of the Scotland Yard Bomb Squad, began to interrogate them, he heard some disquieting comments, recorded in police notes and later obtained under court order by the Guildford Four defense.
‘‘My first job? You’ve already got someone for that,’’ said one of the men, explaining that he had been on the Woolwich bomb team. Asked about Armstrong and Hill he replied, ‘‘Never heard of them.’’
When questioned by Imbert, 22-year-old Joseph O’Connell, who had succeeded Brendan Dowd as the leader of the unit, admitted he had carried out the Woolwich and Guildford bombings with Dowd but said he wasn’t prepared to talk. ‘‘It won’t do any good,’’ he said. The key confession came from Dowd: he admitted being the male part of the ‘‘courting couple’’ who planted the Horse and Groom bomb. Dowd recalled details about two of the pub’s other customers, two old men with shopping bags, that had never been revealed in public.
On Jan. 24, 1977, the ‘‘Balcombe Street unit’’ went on trial. Originally the four defendants had been accused of 144 separate charges. By the trial the indictment was reduced to 100. Charges relating to the period from August to December 1974, before the Guildford Four arrests, were dropped.
O’Connell immediately called attention to the strange omissions on the charge sheet. In the tradition of Irish Republicanism, he refused to recognize the court, but added: ‘‘I refuse to plead because the indictment does not include two charges concerning the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. I took part in both, for which innocent people have been convicted.’’
It was a bizarre trial. The I.R.A. men instructed defense counsel to attack prosecution witnesses in a bid to uncover evidence of their own involvement in the Guildford and Woolwich attacks. During cross-examination a forensic scientist, Douglas Higgs, who had examined the pattern of throw-bomb attacks, admitted he had changed his original statement at the request of the police. His first statement had linked Woolwich to all the other attacks, which had taken place when the Guildford Four were already in police custody. His second statement - the one given to the court - omitted any reference to the Woolwich attack.
The point was crucial. If the same people using the same materials and same methods had carried out the Woolwich and the Talbot Arms attacks, then the Guildford Four had to be innocent. Paul Hill was safely behind bars when the Talbot Arms was bombed on Nov. 30, 1974. And the same held for the Guildford time bomb and the one discovered at Aldershot train station - when the Guildford Four were in custody.
Under cross-examination, James Nevill, commander of the Scotland Yard Bomb Squad, admitted that the police had been instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Norman Skelhorn, to tell the scientists to remove from their evidence all references to Woolwich and Guildford. But the judge, Mr. Justice Cantley, barred further questioning about the Guildford bombing as irrelevant.
The jury found the I.R.A. men guilty. But armed with the evidence from the Balcombe Street unit, the Guildford Four went to the Court of Appeal. The appeal opened on Oct. 10, 1977, under Lord Roskill, who had already turned down an appeal by the Maguires.
For Alastair Logan, solicitor for the defendants, the Appeal Court was a legal charade. ‘‘The judges could not bring themselves to believe that terrorists could tell the truth and the police could tell lies,’’ he says. ‘‘I got the distinct impression that the final judgment was written beforehand. The answer was no, and the judges worked back to find how they could get there. It was such an intellectually dishonest exercise I do not believe anyone reading it today could believe it was an honest judgement.’’
In an highly unusual move, given the seriousness of the case (a move later denounced by two other British law lords), the three Appeal Court judges refused to allow a retrial before a jury. Instead, they would hear and rule on the fresh evidence themselves. The prosecution was led by Sir Michael Havers.
The judges decided that the Balcombe Street unit had acted in concert with the Guildford Four. Any inconsistencies between the two sets of confessions were dismissed as part of a ‘‘skillful and cunning attempt’’ by the I.R.A. unit to deceive the court and free their fellow terrorists. The Guildford Four convictions stood.
It was over. Every legal Mavenue had been exhausted. The prisoners’ supporters were hurled into a decade of futile protest.
But the case did not die, largely due to the efforts of Sister Sarah Clarke, an Irish nun living in London, Paul Hill’s family and, most important, defense solicitor Alastair Logan, who for 15 years never let slip an opportunity to prove the innocence of the Guildford Four.
The grimmest moment of the campaign came in January 1980. Manacled to police officers armed with pump-action shotguns, Gerard Conlon was taken to see his dying father at a London hospital. Before his arrest Guiseppe had been an invalid. In prison his condition worsened.
‘‘I will never forget my father lying there,’’ Conlon recalls, ‘‘surrounded by police officers with tubes in his arm, an oxygen mask on, and then him ripping it off and saying to the police, the Catholic Church, the Home Office officials, the politicians who were there: ‘I am an innocent man. I am dying. Oh, look at me.’ Every single one of them with the exception of little Sister Sarah dropped their heads. Not one of them could look my father in the eye.’’ Five days later Guiseppe Conlon was dead.
His death marked a turning point in the campaign. His tuberculosis, so severe that he could hardly walk, made Guiseppe Conlon a most unlikely terrorist. Gradually, a motley assortment of political allies - Sir John Biggs-Davidson, a Conservative M.P.; Gerry Fitt, a Catholic M.P. from Belfast, and Basil Cardinal Hume, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England - became convinced of his innocence and called on the Home Secretary to reopen the case. As memories of the horror of Guildford and Birmingham faded, journalists, too, began taking a second look. Politics played a part as well. The cases were raised in meetings to hammer out the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed in late 1985. The Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is said to have brought up the cases with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Pressure for a new appeal hearing built, and on Aug. 14, 1987, Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, announced that a separate police force, Avon and Somerset, would investigate the Guildford case. By May 1989, the investigators had discovered that the Surrey police had fabricated Armstrong’s confession. The handwritten ‘‘contemporaneous notes’’ that British police must take during interrogations turned out to be copied from a typescript that had been distributed to several officers as a model.
Since the only evidence against the Guildford Four was confessional, any doubt about its origins had catastrophic consequences for the crown case. ‘‘If the police were prepared to tell this sort of lie,’’ Lord Lane later said when quashing the convictions, ‘‘then the whole of their evidence became suspect. On their evidence depended the prosecution case.’’ Upon receiving the report of the Avon and Somerset police, the Director of Public Prosecutions informed the Home Secretary, and an emergency Court of Appeal hearing was called for Oct. 19, 1989, to free the Guildford Four.
The spotlight now turns on the Birmingham Six, who are still serving life sentences and whose convictions were upheld in 1988 by the Court of Appeal. The new Home Secretary, David Waddington, has been presented with fresh evidence but has yet to reopen the case. Meanwhile, the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, which made the arrests, has been disbanded after officers were charged with corruption and fabricating evidence in later cases. The police forensic scientist who testified that he found traces of nitroglycerine on the hands of the defendants was recently retired on grounds of ‘‘limited efficiency.’’ The case is now being examined by the United States Congress and the European Parliament.
For the Guildford Four, there is no epilogue yet. The Government has paid out interim damages of $15,000 to Hill (who is free pending his appeal of the Brian Shaw conviction) and $75,000 to Armstrong, Conlon and Richardson. The criminal investigation into the activities of the Surrey police continues. But the judicial inquiry headed by Sir John May will not report until 1992. Legal scholars and editorial commentators have urged a substantial reform of the British legal system: at the least, a new, more independent Court of Appeal; if possible, the adoption of a Bill of Rights to safeguard individual liberties.
‘‘The thing that surprises most people outside England is that we have no written constitution and that concepts like the right to silence, which were developed here and have borne fruit in other constitutions, were never formalized,’’ says Gareth Peirce, lawyer for Gerard Conlon and the Birmingham Six. ‘‘When the authorities feel under threat, those concepts are easily violated because nobody knows exactly what their rights are.’’
‘‘The really frightening thing about the Guildford Four case,’’ she says, ‘‘is that something similar could happen again tomorrow.’’[/QUOTE]
:mad::mad::mad:
This makes me so fucking angry I could vomit. Fucking bastards.
He’s not been well for some time, never right after getting out. Think he struggled with drink also. Not sure how you could ever be right after such an ordeal honestly.
He was an innocent man. The bed of heaven to him and hopefully, peace.
An article from Conlon in the Guardian. It’s hard to imagine what that imprisonment and his father’s death must have done to him but he does a good job of at least touching on the issues in this article from the Guardian a few years back.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/05/gerry-conlon-miscarriage-of-justice
My ordeal goes on. For others the nightmare is just starting
I suffer from nightmares and have done so for many years. Strangely, I didn’t have them during the 15 years I in spent in prison after being wrongly convicted, with three others, for the 1975 Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. It was almost as if I was in the eye of the storm while I was inside, and everything was being held back for a replay later in my life.
Our case is well known now as one of the first of the big miscarriage of justice stories, and I am often contacted by people who, like me, spent many years in jail for something they did not do. People ask whether a case like ours could happen today. Of course it could. I know of innocent people still behind bars and I know there are echoes of what happened to us in cases that are still coming to light today.
What happened to us, after all, is not dissimilar to what happened to Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held for many years in Guantánamo Bay. Like him, we were tortured – guns put in our mouths, guns held to our heads, blankets put over our heads. The case against us was, like his, circumstantial. And like him, we tried to get people to listen to what had happened to us, and it took years before our voices were heard outside.
What has been happening in Britain since 2005 has created the same sort of conditions that helped to lead to our arrest. The same procedures are being followed – arrest as many as you can and present a circumstantial case in the hope that at least some of them will be convicted. The one difference, so far, is that juries seem less inclined to convict. But if there is another series of bombs, who knows if that will still apply?
It is still hard to describe what it is like to be facing a life sentence for something you did not do. For the first two years, I still had a little bit of hope. I would hear the jangling of keys and think that this was the time the prison officers were going to come and open the cell door and set us free. But after the Maguire Seven[/URL] (all also wrongly convicted) – my father among them – were arrested, we started to lose that hope. Not only did we have to beat the criminal justice system but we also had to survive in prison. Our reality was that nightmare. They would urinate in our food, defecate in it, put glass in it. Our cell doors would be left open for us to be beaten and they would come in with batteries in socks to beat us over the head. I saw two people murdered. I saw suicides. I saw somebody set fire to himself in [URL=‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jan/13/prisons-long-lartin-gang-culture-islam’]Long Lartin prison.
The first glimmer of home did not come until my father (Guiseppe Conlon, also wrongly convicted and posthumously cleared) died in prison in 1980. My father’s last words were “my death will be the key to your release”. That proved to be the case, because that was when a number of MPs started to become involved.
It was a terrible price to pay. What many people do not realise is how difficult it is to have your case reopened. It was in 1979 that I wrote to Cardinal Basil Hume about our case and he came to see me in prison. I remember it well: I had been playing football and I was called in to see him – he looked like Batman in his long cloak and he was great, but it was still another 10 years before we were free – even although the authorities knew full well by then who had carried out the bombings and that it was not us.
Since I came out of prison, I have suffered two breakdowns, I have attempted suicide, I have been addicted to drugs and to alcohol. The ordeal has never left me. I was given no psychological help by the government that had locked me up, no counselling. Since our case there have been perhaps 200 others we have heard about of innocent people being released, Sean Hodgson being the latest, and probably a few thousand others that have not had the publicity. I would say the vast majority have almost certainly had problems with drug addiction, have been estranged from their families and disenfranchised from society – yet they have been offered little in the way of help. The money we received in compensation went quickly as a lot of hangers-on arrived on the scene.
I am 55 now and I was 20 when I was arrested so what happened to us has taken up 35 years of my life. I am now with the girl that I met when I first came out of prison and I owe her an enormous amount of gratitude. Others have not been so lucky. I hope that what happened to us will always act as a reminder to people never to jump to conclusions, whatever the nature of a crime, and never to ignore the people who are now trying to get their voices heard so that the nightmare does not happen to them.
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Miriam O’Callaghan did an interview with Gerry Conlon and Paddy Hill less than three months ago which I must listen to again.
@chewy louie
Does Paul Hill still live in Clare?
if you locate it post it up…
[QUOTE=“Il Bomber Destro, post: 967807, member: 2533”]@chewy louie
Does Paul Hill still live in Clare?[/QUOTE]
? I don’t think he ever lived in Clare?
He had enough shit to deal with in his life in all fairness