Lawyers who represented the men and women wrongly convicted of the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings this week warned about a return to ‘the bad old days’, called for ‘a complete reconstruction’ of the miscarriage of justice watchdog and criticised a ‘deeply conservative’ Court of Appeal. Speaking at an event to mark the 50th anniversary of a series of miscarriages of justice that shook the public’s faith in our justice system and led to a fundamental reform of the justice system, Michael Mansfield KC said: ‘We’re back in a situation where the system hasn’t got a failsafe.’
The event which took place in the House of Commons explored the legacy of the so-called Irish cases: the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Maguire Seven.
The Birmingham Six were wrongly convicted in 1975 for the murder of 21 people as a result of bombs placed in two Birmingham pubs in November 1974. Speakers included Patrick Maguire of the Maguire Seven who was just 13 years old when he was arrested with his parents, his 17-year-old brother, two uncles and a family friend for running a bomb factory from their North London home. Patrick’s cousin, Gerry Conlon, had been wrongly accused of carrying out the 1974 IRA bombing of two pubs in Guildford. The attack killed five people and injured 65.
The fight for justice and accountability continues. There were calls for the release of the 700 files on the Guildford pub bombings due to be released in 2020 but subsequently blocked by the Home Office. ‘How can we learn from the past mistakes, if we can’t read about these cases?’ asked filmmaker Ros Franey, who has made a number of documentaries on the case.
The series of miscarriages relating to the IRA bombings – alongside other scandals such as as the Cardiff Three and Stefan Kiszko – led to reforms of the criminal justice system designed to prevent such wrongful convictions happening again.
This week’s event was attended by the victims of miscarriages of justice such as Paul Blackburn who spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit as well as those claiming to be wrongly convicted including former police officer Danny Major, whose conviction remains in place despite being seemingly vindicated following an investigation by Greater Manchester Police a decade ago, and the former trader Tom Hayes. There were many people in the room whose loved ones are in prison and whose campaigns have featured on the Justice Gap including Mick Geen, father of Ben Geen; Kirstie Moore, sister of Jason Moore; Mariam Hussain, sister of Khobaib Hussain of the so-called Birmingham Four; as well those claiming to be wrongly convicted under the controversial law of joint enterprise.
L to R: Patrick Maguire, Ros Franey, Chris Mullin, Kim Johnson MP, Alastair Logan, Michael Mansfield and Gareth Peirce
The event was hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice. ‘Sadly, we know that too many people are still being convicted of serious crimes that they didn’t commit, including lots of young black men under the doctrine of joint enterprise,’ said the APPG’s chair Kim Johnson. ‘This afternoon, I met with the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce representing the Birmingham Four convicted in 2017 for alleged terrorist offenses. We know that the CCRC receives at least 1,500 applications every year to have their cases sent back to the court. But many of us in this room know that the CCCR is not fit for purpose.’
The Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up on the recommendation of a royal commission established on the day that the Birmingham Six walked out of the Old Bailey as free men after 16 years in prison. Gareth Peirce and Michael Mansfield, both lawyers involved in the Guildford and Birmingham and many more miscarriage cases, agreed that after a brief ‘halcyon’ period, the newly-formed CCRC was swiftly undermined.
According to Mansfield, its powers were ‘eroded’ as a result a lack of underfunding and a huge increase in workload for its in investigators. But, he cited another ‘bigger reason’: ‘the attitude of the Court of Appeal’ which changed towards the CCRC. ‘They became highly critical of the CCRC, the silk said. ‘So they felt they were getting their fingers burned, and that made them retreat.’
It’s an analysis that chimed with last week’s Law Commission report which was critical of the Court of Appeal for trying to ‘fetter’ the miscarriage of justice watchdog (as reported by the Justice Gap). Gareth Peirce identified what she called the ‘terrible relationship’ between a ‘deeply conservative’ Court of Appeal sending out ‘frightening signals’ to a subservient CCRC. This has led to ‘a self-imposed censorship’ on the part of the watchdog, as she explained: ‘There is a circularity which is taking it back to a really demoralised and depressed psyche for those who are working trying to undo conviction or trying to achieve in a difficult case an acquittal that ought to be achieved.’
Chair: Roger Hearing
Panellists were asked by the chair Roger Hearing to identify a moment that they related to the time of the original miscarriages. ‘It so happens the fourth of March 1976 is when we got convicted and we all got separated,’ began Patrick Maguire, the youngest of the so called Maguire Seven.
He recalled his first night in custody when he was taken to what he was told was a ‘hospital’ but transpired to be part of the adult prison where he was held. ‘I was put into solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for the best part of the month,’ he said. ‘The only thing that kept me company was a red light every night, I was absolutely left alone. The only time any adult ever came to me was to give me a bucket a hot water, a scrubbing brush, a bar of soap and an old rag.’ He said he ‘could fill this room up with memories like that. It still haunts me to this day.’
Gareth Peirce paid tribute to Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six who died before Christmas and who she had known for 40 years. She called him ‘the most courageous person I’ve ever met’. ‘People talk about contribution of lawyers or journalists, but it was Paddy who made the case open again. It was Paddy who after all legal avenues had been deliberately demolished who single-handedly wrote hundreds of letters. It was Paddy who had the experience and courage to resist when he was smashed to smithereens in the police station. He was the one who didn’t confess, he wouldn’t sign a false confession. He lit the fuse. It shouldn’t be an assumption there’s always a fuse waiting to be lit. There isn’t. He was the bravest of the brave. He was the angriest of the angry. He was the kindest of the kind. He was quite extraordinary.’
The solicitor Alastair Logan recalled receiving a call at 10am on the morning of December 10, 1974 from the local magistrates’ court asking if he was prepared to accept a legal aid certificate to represent ‘one of one of the bombers’. He declined on the basis that he was a sole practitioner and there were larger firms in Guildford better suited to deal with the case. Four hours later, he was rung back to be told no lawyers were prepared to take it on. ‘I’m now in my 51st year of this case and it still isn’t finished,’ he said.
Logan called the framing of the Guildford Four ‘corruption on an industrial scale’. ‘There has been no accountability for crimes that caused this miscarriage of justice,’ the solicitor said. More than 700 files were due to be opened in 2020; but instead they were removed by the Home Office from the National Archives and locked away again. Logan has written about his attempts to get access to to the papers for the Justice Gap (here).
The filmmaker Ros Franey has written about this turn of events in the latest edition of her book originally written with Grant McKee, Time Bomb: Irish bombs, English justice, and the Guildford Four. ‘Why have they shut away these 700 files until the end of the century?’ It’s incomprehensible that 50 years after the bombing, there should still be issues of national security surrounding surrounding these files. It’s a historic case,’ she said. ‘How can we learn from past mistakes if there is a coverup to this extent?’
Speaking to the Justice Gap after the event, Alastair Logan said: ‘The British government should own up to what has happened and clear the decks. That means making available the papers that they have now sealed until the end of the century, and allowing a full exploration of it. The chances now of calling anybody to account are negligible. Most of the players have died. I can’t think of a single police officer still alive. The judge has died, the trial judge has died, crown counsel both have died.’
The solicitor points out that its not just 700 files that related to the 1994 May inquiry that have now been buried. At the 2017 inquest, he reports that Surrey Police allocated a dozen officers to catalogue all the paperwork. ‘The material that was gathered together far exceeds anything that the [1994] May inquiry had,’ Logan told the Justice Gap. He explained that the material collected was ‘totally irrelevant to the inquiry’ because the coroner had narrowed the ambit to only addressing how people died as opposed to who did it. ‘The consequence of that was that the Home Office are now possessed not only of the 700 files that relate to the May inquiry, but to this vast quantity that has taken two and a half years and massive public expense to collect.’
Chris Mullin, the former MP who as a journalist did so much to expose the terrible injustice of the Birmingham Six was on the panel. He recalled the anti Irish hysteria which was the background to the series of miscarriages of justice. ‘Many of these convictions were taken on the basis of uncorroborated, unwitnessed confessions extracted in police custody and instantly repudiated once the suspect was out of custody. And that in the 1950s we hanged people on that basis.’
In the new edition of his account of the Birmingham Six Error of Judgment, he argues that it is ‘just about imaginable’ for history to repeat itself and there to be another case like that. He spoke about his own concerns about the Lucy Letby conviction. ’I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that I think she’s necessarily innocent, but I can say that it not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, and the case looks like it’s unraveling.’ Letby’s lawyer Mark McDonald was in the audience. ‘There are currently four nurses in prison serving life sentences,’ the barrister said. ‘All four of them are innocent: Lucy Letby, Colin, Norris, Ben Geen and Victorino Chu.’
Mariam Hussain, sister of Khobaib Hussain
Gareth Peirce highlighted the case of Birmingham Four which has featured on the Justice Gap: Khobaib Hussain, Naweed Ali, Mohibur Rahman and Tahir Aziz are presently serving long sentences for being part of a terrorist plot. The men claim that they were fitted up by corrupt police officers who planted evidence in the car of one of the men who had bene recruited to work in a fake courier company that undercover officers had set up.
The lawyer said the four young men had never heard of the Birmingham Six but for her it was like ‘living in a time warp’. An application has been made to the CCRC. ’Their approach to all cases has to be to find something new. There are hundreds of pieces of evidence exposed as false – any one could have led to the case being reopened but the CCRC’s approach is that the jury has heard all this. The men are totally, totally innocent. They should not be in prison. They are from a community that has become a suspect community. They are suffering exactly an identical reproduction of what happened 50 years ago.’
‘Tell me it can’t happen again? You can’t,’ Alastair Logan said. ‘If police officers are going to commit crime and that results in the conviction of innocent people, it will happen.’
Remembering Paddy Hill
The event was an opportunity to pay respects to Paddy Joe Hill of the Birmingham Six who died before Christmas.
Cathy Molloy of Paddy’s Glasgow based organisation MOJO paid the following tribute:
‘Paddy was my boss. He was my friend. He was my hero. For someone to go through what Paddy went through and to dedicate his life to helping other people who are in that situation takes a special type of person. The damage that is done to somebody who is wrongfully imprisoned I saw in him every single day.
I look around this room, and there are so many people that I have worked with, and so many people that I know. Miscarriages of justice should not be happening. The CCRC was set up so that this never happened again. I have retired, but I had a job that I wish I didn’t have too have had. It should be happening for goodness sake. It’s 2025 and no lessons have been learned. They change the rules; there is compensation, no compensation. They don’t say that these people are innocent. They say your conviction is ‘quashed’. There is no apology. Something needs to be done.’
