The Guilford Four: Drug-Induced and Coerced Confessions - Term Paper Example

? The Guilford Four The association between Ireland and Britain has been very tough. Even though just 150 miles of sea separate the two, the political and religious disparities that have been apparent ever since the sixteenth century have culminated into extended periods of persecution, conflict as well as war. During the late 1960s through 1970s, civil rights campaigns, motivated by a global movement for civil rights to obtain voting rights, as well as rights to jobs, services, among others, were rampant in Ireland as the country endeavored to gain complete liberation from the British colonial masters. The intensity of the ensuing aggression culminated into the deployment of the British Army in Ireland. The IRA (Irish Republican Army) was one of the most violent military parties that fought for Ireland’s independence. In the early 1970s, the group started challenging British troops in Ireland. With time, the group’s violence developed into massive bombing campaigns aimed at public utility, civilian, as well as military targets. When the British, in the effort to control the increasing aggression, introduced incarceration without trial in the year 1971 August, corroboration for the IRA increased. There arose many cases of injustices in the British legal system when dealing with Irish-related cases – wrong imprisonment of innocent Irish victims by the British government increased significantly (Fitzduff and O’Hagan, 2000). This paper delves into the Guilford episode, an incident that had to do with drug-induced and coerced confessions, fabricated and suppressed evidence, and a society under siege dashing into judgment. The Guilford episode saw the arrest and false conviction of four innocent people following the bombing of the Guildford and Woolwich English pubs, which English soldiers liked frequenting while off duty. The suspects were henceforth referred to as the Guilford Four. The bombing led to the death of seven people and forty-two others were sustained injuries (Howard, 1992). The paper also explores the political and cultural climate that was present in both England and Ireland at the time of the bombing, and talks about English attitudes towards the Irish. Introduction The case of the Guilford Four presents a good example of an injustice in an Irish-related case that took place on 22 October 1975, when Paddy Armstrong, Paul Hill, Carole Richardson, and Gerry Conlon, four young people from Northern Ireland were convicted for the 5 October 1974 bombings of Guilford and Woolwich on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. The bombs went off in pubs in Guilford and Woolwich that British soldiers liked to visit while off duty, killing seven people and injuring forty-two others. This was the reason as to why they were selected as targets by the IRA. In other words, this terrorist attack was part of a bombing campaign and a wave of violent attacks that the Irish Republican Army committed against Great Britain in the 1970s (Bihler, 2009). The political and cultural climate that was present in both England and Ireland at the time of the bombing The Guilford and Woolwich bombings occurred at a time when IRA had taken a horrible toll on Britain – in the first ten months of the year 1974; Britain had experienced ninety-nine bombings with injuries amounting to approximately one hundred and forty five people and fatalities/deaths amounting to nineteen people. Spaced out as the bombings were, the deaths and injuries might have been at a tolerable level, but on 21 November 1974, all this changed with the Guilford and Woolwich bombings. In retaliation to the two bombings, Britain convulsed with anger – angry mobs assailed innocent Irish residents in Birmingham streets and in London, they firebombed Irish businesses. Innocent Irish people became scapegoats for the atrocities of the IRA and the attempts of public officials to appeal for calm and stop the bombings in the streets were futile (Howard, 1992). A sampling of headlines as well as sub-headlines from October through December of the year 1974 clearly describes the campaign of the IRA against England – Third club bombed; Bomb hits two West End military clubs; Post Box bombed at Victoria; Four people hurt in Belgravia bomb attack; Tower of London bombed; Bomb explodes at Harrods Newport; among others (Howard, 1992). In the midst of this state of siege, the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad carried out investigations and arrested Paddy Armstrong, Paul Hill, Carole Richardson, and Gerry Conlon solely on typed ‘confessions’ that had been produced while in police custody. By majority vote, the jury believed the police account of events and convicted the four young people. The trial judge, in sentencing them to life imprisonment, loudly declared that he wished that the law had allowed him to send them to the gallows (Howard, 1992). Ewing and McCann (2006) explain that Great Britain did not have capital punishment and therefore, none of the Guildford Four could be face the death penalty. Even though the Gulliford Four were all sentenced to life imprisonment, the presiding judge, under British law, put forward a minimum term that each of the convicts would be supposed to serve before qualifying for parole. Armstrong received a recommended sentence of thirty-five years to life while Conlon was sentenced to thirty years to life. Because of her age, Richardson would have to serve a minimum of twenty years before becoming eligible for parole. As he sentenced the three convicts, judge Donaldson elucidated the fact that the minimum term did not imply that they would ever be pardoned. He said that the lower terms were only meant as an absolute minimum prison term. He told them that they might never be discharged. On the other hand, the judge sentenced Hill, who was also implicated in a third bombing, to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. According to the judge, the only hope Hill might have of being set free was if he became very sick or very old and almost dying. The sentencing that the Gulidford Four received is said to be the longest ever in modern British courts’ history (Ewing and McCann, 2006). Convinced that the sentencing was an injustice, some groups began fighting for the release of the Gulidford Four as they started serving their sentences. In December of the year 1975, a high-speed car chase through the streets of London that resulted in a police raid at a house on Balcombe Street in Marylebone. The police arrested four Iranian men who came to be referred to as the Balcombe Street Four. The men confessed to the bombings and declared that the Guildford Four had nothing to do with them. During their trial, the men presented the Court with details of the bombing, confirmed by police files, which only accomplices could have known. They also stated that in the year 1975, their lawyers had notified the Director of Public Prosecutions of this. Despite the fact that this new evidence was presented at an appeal for the Guildford Four, their convictions were upheld (Prenzler, 2009 & Ewing and McCann, 2006). Lord Roskill made the conclusion that the IRA men had collaborated with the Guildford Four in perpetrating the crime. Despite the fact that the IRA men claimed responsibility to the Guildford murders and practically proved their guilt, they were never indicted for the crime (Walker, 1999). Prenzler (2009) explains that the Guilford Four only managed to reach the court of appeal following a rigorous national campaign. During trial, the four young men had pulled back their confessions arguing that they signed them while being held with no charge in police custody after being starved, tortured, beaten, deprived of sleep and after receiving threats against their beloveds (Howard, 1992). The ‘confessions’ were also found to have one hundred and fifty three factual discrepancies in addition to lacking external corroboration (Prenzler, 2009). Other new proof (including of medical conditions and alibis) was eventually gathered. The evidence influenced the Home Secretary to demand for additional investigations and a referral back to the Court of Appeal. The Home Secretary was compelled to admit that when she made the confession, Carole Richardson was withdrawing from barbituaries, and that there were alibi witnesses for Carole Richardson and Paul Hill. A Home Office report also revealed that the Four were hippies and loafers who were improbable terrorists, and that there was no proof of any association with the IRA. It was also found out that the Surrey Police detectives involved in the case had made up statements (especially of Paddy Armstrong) and smothered possible exculpatory proof. The police, in preparation for the appeal, gave Detective Inspector Doreen Bryant the mandate of reviewing the evidence contained in an archive. Bryant found out that there were different accounts of the typed confessions and notes. It appeared as if the hand-written notes might have been fabricated after the confessions were typed. It was also discovered that a bundle of documents contained a statement from an alibi witness for Gerry Conlon. The chief prosecutor, Michael Havers, had earlier criticized Conlon in the dock regarding the lack of an alibi. The Public Prosecutions director made the decision that the material made the verdicts unsafe and chose not to oppose the appeal. He also chose not to contest the convictions, arguing that the ‘confessions’ of the Guildford Four had been extracted by coercion. In the year 1989, fourteen years after the conviction of the Guilford Four, Lord Lane, the Chief Justice, released them and quashed their convictions (Prenzler, 2009 and Whitton, 1998). Since the Guilford Four were freed following the review of their case and the overturning of their convictions by an appellate court, there was no new trial at which official proof was offered to prove that all their confessions were false. Still, the subsequent evaluation of Richardson and the detailed explanation of the way in which the intense police questioning affected her psychologically explain something. It explains how unique psychological susceptibilities in a criminal suspect, coercive interrogation methods, and police officers who are not willing to look at other possibilities except the guilt of a given suspect can force suspects to confess to a crime they never committed. This happened four times in the case of the Guildford Four (Ewing and McCann, 2006). The case of the Guilford Four is one of the most infamous occurrences of wrongful conviction founded on an untrue confession. It was indeed one of the worst injustices in recent history. The case of the Guilford Four presents an excellent example of the way in which miscarriages could take place in the British criminal justice system against the Irish. Apparently, the British criminal justice system treated Irish suspect terrorists unfairly – there was an obvious partiality in the British criminal justice system when dealing with the dependability of the convictions. This prompted the Irish legal and political establishment to start addressing this bias towards the end of the 1980s. The Irish government, by means of the machinery of the Anglo-Irish Conference, repeatedly expressed its concern concerning the dependability of the convictions in such cases as that of the Guilford Four, the Birmingham six, among others. The Irish attorney general at one point even went to the extent of declining an application for the extradition of one Fr Patrick Ryan to answer terrorist charges by the British. The attorney general explained the refusal on the ground that he could not be satisfied that the suspect would get a fair trial from the British criminal justice system based on the experiences of Irish suspects (Walker, 1999). The Guildford Four later received monetary compensation for their ordeal, although reaching the settlement took years. It took them more than twenty years before they were able to clear their names, but in the year 2000 June, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, issued them with a formal apology (Ewing and McCann, 2006). Conclusion Apparently, the case of the Guilford Four is one of the most infamous occurrences of wrongful conviction founded on an untrue confession. Britain holds a great catalogue of injustices concerning Irish terrorist cases. As discussed in this case of the Guildford Four, among others, the British criminal justice system sent many innocent Iranian suspects to prison. If there was capital punishment in Great Britain, these innocent victims would have faced the death penalty. Corruption and police misconduct were the order of the day in the British criminal justice system. Unfortunately, these injustices have still been prevalent even in very recent times and this calls for a closer scrutiny of the conduct of legal professional s; in addition to the development of more robust systems in order to see to it that there is ethical conduct and that any miscarriage of justice is detected and remedied. References Bihler, R. (2009). Miscarriages in the British legal system - “The Guildford Four” and “The Birmingham Six”. Munich, Germany: GRIN Verlag. Ewing, C. P. & McCann, J. T. (2006). Minds on trial: Great cases in law and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzduff, M. and O’Hagan, L. (2000). The Northern Ireland Troubles: INCORE background paper. Retrieved from http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/incorepaper.htm Howard, L. (1992). Terrorism: Roots, impact, responses. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. Prenzler, T. (2009). Ethics and accountability in criminal justice: Towards a universal standard. Bowen Hills, Qld: Australian Academic Press. Walker, C. (1999). Miscarriages of justice: A review of justice in error. London: Blackstone Press. Whitton, E. (1998). The cartel: Lawyers and their nine magic tricks. Sydney: Herwick. Read More