Guildford Four
Four people who were innocently convicted of terrorists in 1975 became known as the Guildford Four : the three Northern Irish Patrick “Paddy” Armstrong , Gerard “Gerry” Conlon and Paul Michael Hill and the Englishwoman Carole Richardson .
One of the most serious misjudgments in recent British judicial history was triggered by the Provisional IRA's bomb attacks on two pubs in Guildford (“Horse and Groom” and “Seven Stars”) on October 5, 1974 , in which five people were killed and another 65, partially were seriously injured, as well as a bomb attack on a pub in Woolwich on November 7, 1974, which killed two people.
Bomb attacks and the Prevention of Terrorism Act
In particular, in October and November of 1974, the Balcombe Street Gang of the Provisional Irish Republican Army carried out a series of bombings in England that had a major impact on public opinion there. The most devastating attacks were the bombings of Guildford with 5 fatalities and 65 injured (October 5, 1974), of Woolwich with 2 fatalities (November 7, 1974) and of Birmingham with 21 fatalities and 161 injured (November 21, 1974), the latter however, it was not perpetrated by the Balcombe Street Gang . Forced by the media, a clear anti-Irish mood developed in the population after the Guildford attacks, which culminated in arson attacks on an Irish community house, a Roman Catholic school and an Irish pub in Birmingham. In order to calm the tense situation and to meet the public demand for consequences, the Prevention of Terrorism Act was enacted on November 29, 1974 in a fast-track proceeding (German: Law on the Prevention of Terrorism, Anti- Terrorism Act ). This new law allowed the government to restrict freedom of movement within the UK and the police to temporarily arrest suspects even if there was insufficient evidence. Furthermore, the Minister of the Interior was authorized to allow the police to detain terror suspects for up to seven days without the intervention of a judge.
Arrest and Confessions of the Guildford Four
Paul Michael Hill was the first of the Guildford Four to be arrested on November 28, 1974, almost at the same time as the proclamation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The Northern Irishman, who lives in a dormitory in Kilburn, England, and at times with squatters , was arrested at his girlfriend's parents' house in Southampton and taken to Guildford. On November 30th, police raided the Conlon family's home on Cyprus Street in Belfast. Gerry Conlon, who spent some time in England from August to October 1974, was arrested there and also transported to Guildford Police Headquarters. Both were forced to confess using long-term torture (including threats of violence, sleep deprivation, psychological torture, refusal of food, in the case of Paul Hill also a mock execution) by officers from the Surrey Police and the specially flown in Royal Ulster Constabulary . Hill writes about this in his autobiography:
“On Friday morning I was totally bruised and weak from hunger. In addition there was my mental state. I ran out of reserves and ran out of nerves. I had never been given time to think, I was unable to review my situation calmly and sensibly. [...] But logic is the first victim of isolation and psychological terror [...]. "
And further:
“Finally I confessed, my nerves at the end. I would have consented to everything, only to be finally left alone. "
In addition to the confessions, Hill and Conlon, who had no connection with the IRA apart from Conlon's membership of the Provisional Fianna , which lasted only a few months , also recorded a list of people who were supposed to be connected with IRA activities under the circumstances mentioned. Conlon named, among other things, the name of his aunt Annie Maguire, Hill named a number of people from the squatter scene. In the course of these statements, in addition to numerous people, the Northern Irishman Patrick "Paddy" Armstrong and his English friend Carole Richardson were arrested. Together with Hill and Conlon, Armstrong and Richardson were indicted as the main culprits in the Guildford attacks. Annie Maguire and six other family members and friends, including Gerry Conlon's father Joseph Patrick "Giuseppe" Conlon, were charged as IRA supporters and later sentenced to long prison terms. They went down in history as Maguire Seven . Paul Hill also confessed to the murder, which he did not commit, of Brian Shaw, a former British military man who was killed in 1974 in a Republican neighborhood of Belfast . In this confession based, he was - even before the Guildford- - processes indicted in Belfast and sentenced to life imprisonment. In his autobiography Proved Innocent , Gerry Conlon later put forward the thesis that the brutality of the Surrey Police was also due to the fact that the Birmingham police were able to present confessed perpetrators just a few hours after the bombings there with the Birmingham Six , but the Surrey Police even after weeks had no results of the investigation of the Guildford attacks in hand and appeared to be incompetent in public opinion.
Alibis
Both Carole Richardson and Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill were able to provide alibis during the investigation for the period of the Guildford attacks. Conlon stated that at the time in question he was together with a homeless man of Irish descent in a London park and in a dormitory for Irish workers. But he couldn't remember the name of the person in the park. As it later turned out, the Surrey Police investigated Conlon's statements and were actually able to confirm the statements in January 1975. However, the existing alibi was marked with the note “Not to be disclosed to the defense” (translated as “May not be passed on to the defense”), kept under lock and key and not used in the proceedings.
Carole Richardson also had an alibi. While she was in custody, an English friend of hers reported to the police who said he had been to a concert with Carole Richardson during the period in question. According to him, this witness was also arrested and, according to his own account, forced to revise his testimony through torture and threats.
Paul Hill was staying with his girlfriend in Southampton at the time of the bombing. By his own admission, he was never in Southampton later than 6:00 p.m. when arriving from London. This was well before the attacks in “Seven Stars” and “Horse & Groom”. He found out about the attacks themselves from the newspaper the following day.
Trial and sentencing
The Guildford Four trial began on September 16, 1975 at the Old Bailey . Immediately after the trial began, all four of the accused revoked their confessions, citing torture. Police officers heard as witnesses, however, testified under oath that they had not used violence. The revocations and the allegations of torture that were raised were then given no significance in the later judgment. Nor was it taken into account that during the interrogation of the then seventeen-year-old and thus underage Carole Richardson, contrary to existing regulations, neither a legal guardian nor a legal adviser were present.
The defense's attempt to clarify why police arrested Paul Hill as a suspect in the Guildford attacks was not pursued by Presiding Judge John Donaldson . It was only recorded that the police had investigated "information from Belfast".
Statements from survivors of the Guildford bombings suggested that a man and a woman planted the bomb in the Horse & Groom pub, and two women and a man in the Seven Stars pub. The investigative authorities put this to Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson. However, phantom images made on the basis of witness statements showed no resemblance to the two, nor was it possible for the witnesses to recognize Carole Richardson as the perpetrator in a comparison.
After the taking of evidence had been completed, neither substantiated testimony nor forensic evidence was available to confirm the prosecution's point of view. Rather, there were exonerating statements, at least in the case of Carole Richardson, because her boyfriend corrected his statement in court in favor of Richardson, which he said he had given incorrectly due to torture. However, the prosecution took the view that Richardson may have planted the bomb first and then went to the concert named in the testimony as a planned alibi. For this reason, Judge Donaldson based his judgment on October 22, 1975 exclusively on the confessions of the four defendants, which were given in police custody. The four defendants were each sentenced to life imprisonment on this basis. Judge Donaldson did not set a minimum length of detention for Richardson, but decreed that Conlon should serve no less than 30 years and Armstrong no less than 35 years:
“I must stress the words 'not less than'. [...] I do not mean by this recommendation to give you any reason for hoping that after 30 or 35 years you will necessarily ever be released ”
“I have to stress the words 'no less than'. With this recommendation, I give you no reason to hope that you will ever be released after 30 or 35 years. "
In the case of Paul Hill, Judge Donaldson waived a restriction, but made it clear that a life sentence really meant the full length of his life:
“In my view your crime is such that life imprisonment must mean life. If as an act of mercy you are ever to be released it could only be on account of great age or infirmity. "
“In my opinion, your crime is one where life imprisonment must be life. If you are ever released in an act of mercy, it can only be because of old age or frailty. "
Appeal attempts, private initiative and readmission and release
An appeal by the "Guildford Four" was dismissed in 1977, although a convicted IRA unit, subsequently known as the "Balcombe Street Gang", which had carried out numerous attacks in Great Britain, had committed itself to the attacks in Guildford and Woolwich, among others . The four members of the Balcombe gang also testified during the Guildford Four's appeal process and took full responsibility for the acts. Furthermore, an expert was heard who called the bomb attacks of 1974 and 1975, also after the imprisonment of Hill, Conlon, Armstrong and Richardson, due to identical explanations and details, as a "series of attacks", which was very likely carried out by the same perpetrators . However, the chief prosecutor interpreted the evidence in such a way that the members of the Balcombe gang (now also sentenced to life imprisonment) tried to free their IRA friends from prison by assuming sole guilt. He also presented investigation results which allowed the interpretation that the attacks were carried out jointly by the Guildford Four and the Balcombe gang. The judge responsible followed this interpretation and dismissed the appeal.
The fate of the "Guildford Four" did not find its way back into the national headlines again until the 1980s - also due to the death of Giuseppe Conlon - and gave a boost to a private initiative launched by relatives, which persistently campaigned for the release of the four prisoners. The English Cardinal Basil Hume , who had been in written contact with Giuseppe Conlon from 1978 until his death , was particularly committed in this context . This initiative, later known as "the Deputation" or "the Campaign," and the commitment of lawyers Alastair Logan and Gareth Peirce ultimately did not increase the pressure on the British judiciary and the responsible Home Secretary Merlyn Rees to order a re-investigation of the case most recently after several celebrities, including members of parliament , had campaigned for the release of the "Four". In 1987, the British Home Office (Home Office) drew up a memorandum in which the guilt of the "Guildford Four" was questioned, and set up the Sharples Commission to investigate the creation of the confessions and convictions. This commission analyzed the court and police files and found irregularities. In Armstrong's case, for example, there was a typewritten confession to which handwritten additions were made. However, an entirely handwritten confession was produced during the 1975 trial. The commission suspected that the typewritten confession was made before Armstrong's interrogation and was thus fabricated. In the Hill case, discrepancies were found between the statements of the police officers at the trial and interrogation records. Furthermore, the part of his confession in which he is alleged to have named Carole Richardson was apparently fabricated in full, since this part was made after the indictment was brought. An interrogation of an accused by the police after the charges were brought would have required special applications and permits, which apparently never existed. In Conlon's case, the above statements were found that confirmed his alibi. However, these statements were never used in the trial and were withheld by the Surrey Police.
In 1989 the case was finally reopened. Not least because of the evidence and statements that have now emerged, the court finally overturned the verdicts against the “Guildford Four” on October 19, 1989 and some of the wrongly convicted were released directly from custody. Only Paul Hill was temporarily transferred to a Belfast prison on charges of the murder of a British Army man.
None of the investigators responsible for the torture during questioning has ever been held responsible. In the case of Gerry Conlons, however, compensation payments of between £ 400,000 and £ 500,000 are rumored.
Consequences and aftermath
The British police's interrogation methods were later also the subject of a complaint by the Republic of Ireland against the United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights .
Gerry Conlon's autobiography Proved Innocent was filmed in 1993: In the name of the father with Daniel Day-Lewis , Emma Thompson and Pete Postlethwaite . Conlon, who died on June 21, 2014, continued to be featured in the media, reporting that the consequences of the sentence had still severely affected him years after his release.
Paul Hill married in 1993, four years after his release, the niece of former US President John F. Kennedy , Courtney Kennedy. The media interference of the Kennedy clan in another Hills appeal hearing in 1993 led to massive criticism from the English print media.
On February 9, 2005, almost exactly 30 years after the conviction, Tony Blair publicly apologized to the Guildford Four and their family members, after he had already contacted the four in July 2000.
literature
- Gerry Conlon: Proved innocent: the story of Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four / Gerry Conlon . Hamilton, London 1990, ISBN 0-241-13065-4
- Paul Hill: Stolen Years . Transworld Publisher, London 1990. German edition: Stolen Years . 1991, ISBN 3-404-61206-X
- Ronan Bennett: Double jeopardy: the retrial of the Guildford Four / Ronan Bennett . 1. publ. in the London Review of Books. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1993, ISBN 0-14-023648-1
- Patrick Victory: Justice and Truth: The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven . Sinclair-Stevenson, 2002, ISBN 978-0-9540476-7-2
Web links
- Documentation on the Guildford attack BBC (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Hill: Stolen Years , p. 91
- ↑ a b Rich kid . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1994 ( online ).
- ↑ Paul Hill: Stolen Years , pp. 108-110
- ↑ Gerry Conlon: Proved Innocent . 1993, p. 128f.
- ↑ Case presentation ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 164 kB) innocent.org.uk, pp. 12, 13
- ↑ Paul Hill: Stolen Years , p. 99 f.
- ↑ a b Case presentation ( memento of the original from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 164 kB) innocent.org.uk, p. 6
- ↑ news.bbc.co.uk
- ↑ news.bbc.co.uk
- ↑ Dirty work . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1989 ( online ).
- ↑ A son from Belfast . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1994 ( online ).
- ↑ guardian.co.uk
- ↑ news.bbc.co.uk
- ↑ guardian.co.uk
