Guildford Four

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Guildford Four were a group of people (Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Patrick 'Paddy' Armstrong and Carole Richardson), who were wrongly convicted in the United Kingdom in October 1975 for the Provisional IRA's Guildford pub bombing — which killed five people and injured sixty-five more — and imprisoned for over 15 years.

On February 9, 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued an apology to the families of the eleven people imprisoned for the bombings in Guildford and Woolwich, and those related to them who were still alive, by saying, in part: 'I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and injustice (…) they deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated.'

1 Background
2 Further evidence and a final appeal
3 After the appeals
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Background

Paul Michael Hill was born and raised in Belfast to an unhappily married mixed-religion couple.

There was never any evidence that he or any of The Four had been involved with the PIRA - and they did not 'fit the bill' in terms of lifestyle. Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson, an Englishwoman, lived in a squat, and were involved with drugs and petty crime.

At their trial, the Guildford Four claimed they had been tortured by police until they had agreed to sign a false confession. After they were convicted of murder and received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, the judge expressed regret that the Four had not been charged with treason, which then still had a mandatory death penalty.

During the trial of the Balcombe Street gang in February 1977, the four IRA men instructed their lawyers to 'draw attention to the fact that four totally innocent people were serving massive sentences' for three bombings in Woolwich and Guildford. They were never charged with these offences. However, no evidence has ever been presented that proves the involvement of the four men; they never actually admitted any personal responsibility, and the IRA never identified the true perpetrators of the attack.

The Guildford Four tried to make an appeal under Section 17 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 (later repealed), but were unsuccessful and, in 1987 the Home Office issued a memorandum, recognizing that it was unlikely the Four were terrorists but that this would not be sufficient evidence for appeal.

[edit] Further evidence and a final appeal

In 1989, a detective looking at the case found typed notes from Patrick Armstrong's police interviews, which had been heavily edited. Deletions and additions had been made, and the notes had been rearranged. These notes, and their amendments, were consistent with hand-written and typed notes presented at the trial, which suggested that the hand-written notes were made after the interviews had been conducted. The implication of this was that the police had manipulated the notes, to fit with the case they wanted to present.

An appeal was granted on the basis of this new evidence. They were represented by noted human rights solicitor, Gareth Peirce. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, said that the police had either:

completely fabricated the typed notes, amending them to make them look more effective, and then creating hand-written notes to give the appearance of contemporaneous notes; or
started off with contemporaneous notes, typed them up to make them more legible, amended them to make them read better, and then converted them back to hand-written notes.

Either way, the police had lied, and the conclusion was if they had lied about this, the entire evidence was misleading, and the Four were released in 1989, after having their convictions quashed.

Paul Hill had also been convicted of the murder of a British soldier, Brian Shaw, having 'confessed' to the crime while in the custody of Surrey Police. He was released on bail, pending his appeal against this conviction. In 1994, the Court of Appeal in Belfast quashed Hill's conviction for Brian Shaw's murder.

The Maguire Seven - made up of several family members of Gerry Conlon, including his father Giuseppe, his aunt and his 14- and 16-year-old cousins - were also imprisoned in the same case, mainly for explosives offences. Giuseppe Conlon died in prison, having had troubles with his lungs for many years.

[edit] After the appeals

Gerry Conlon's autobiography Proved Innocent was adapted into the Oscar- and Bafta-award nominated 1993 film In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson and Pete Postlethwaite. He is reported to have settled with the government for a final payment of compensation in the region of £400,000 to £500,000.

Paul Hill married Mary Courtney Kennedy, daughter of the late United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and they had a daughter, Saoirse Roisin Kennedy. The couple are now legally separated.