Gerry Conlon: "The Government knew we were being tortured."
Gerry Conlon: "The Government knew we were being tortured."
Alan: "In The Name of The Father," starring Daniel Day Lewis, dramatizes the true story of innocent men and women
sentenced to hard time because it was convenient for the entire, conspiratorial British legal system to imprison
sacrificial victims, despite knowledge of their innocence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven
IMDb Review:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107207/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
sentenced to hard time because it was convenient for the entire, conspiratorial British legal system to imprison
sacrificial victims, despite knowledge of their innocence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven
IMDb Review:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107207/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
BBC account of The Guildford Four's release:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/19/newsid_2490000/2490039.stm
In 1989 the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four when it was found that crucial alibi evidence - proving Conlon could not have done the bombings - had not been shown to the defence. There was also evidence of police collusion on fabricating the statements - the only evidence produced against them at the original trial. The Maguire Seven later had their convictions overturned, but by this time they had all served their sentences and been released, except Giuseppe Conlon who, already in failing health when he was arrested, died after five years in prison.
The Gerry Conlon that stood outside the High Court in London after his release was a triumphant and charismatic figure. He told massed press and supporters that he was an innocent man who had spent 15 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. He vowed to clear his late father's name and fight for the release of others, like the Birmingham Six and the Bridgwater Three, who had been wrongly convicted.
This is the Conlon that played repeatedly on the news bulletins. And this is the man portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis as the star of In the Name Of the Father, the partly fictionalised 1993 film based on Conlon's autobiography. But Conlon's feelings of triumph were short-lived and he was far from ready for the outside world.
"If you spend a few weeks in the Big Brother house, you get counselling when you leave to prepare you for life outside. I spent 15 years being moved from one terrible prison to the next, being treated like I was lower than the worst kind of paedophile. When I got released I was given £34.90 and told to go."
When long-term prisoners come up for release, they are slowly reintroduced to the outside world, with supervised day releases, then weekend releases. When wrongful convictions are quashed, prisoners leave straight away, with no preparation for how to cope with life on the outside.
Conlon was initially on a high after his release. He put everything into making good his pledge to get the convictions of the Birmingham Six overturned. After months of frantic campaigning, he went back to his mother's house in Belfast to take a break when suddenly the impact of what he had been through hit him.
"I came out of the bathroom and my father, who'd died years earlier, was sitting on the settee in prison pyjamas and a prison dressing gown. Since then I haven't been able to get the terrible images out of my head.
"I never had one suicidal thought in prison. Now I have them all the time. I haven't been able to have a relationship, I've turned to alcohol and drugs, it's a constant waking nightmare."
More than twenty years after his release, the man sitting in front of me is no less eloquent and determined than the angry 35-year old who stood outside court, but his mind has never escaped from prison. He speaks lyrically, without pause, recalling full names, exact dates and locations of the grim landmarks of his ordeal. But at every turn he is visibly haunted by the terrible memories that won't stay in the past and the injustices which continue in the present.
Conlon believes that because their case caused such political embarrassment, there was what he calls a "whispering campaign" around Westminster after their release. That although their conviction was quashed, the authorities wanted people to think they were freed on a technicality, but may actually have been guilty.
He is angry that nobody was ever punished for their wrongful imprisonment. He is also convinced that it was not just the police that lied to get them convicted. He believes the conspiracy to jail innocent people went right to the top.
"The Government knew, right from the start, that we were innocent. They knew we had nothing to do with the IRA, but they didn't care. That's why they have a 75-year immunity order on our case. Because they want all the people involved to be dead before they release our files."
Because this cloud of suspicion was allowed to remain, Conlon was denied access to psychiatric treatment. It was not until 2007 that he began getting regular therapy, and even then only one hour a week. This has helped, but is far too little, coming far too late, for someone who suffered trauma on the level that he did.
"I have what they call a disassociation problem: something comes in to my head and I'm back in prison. I'm back in Wakefield, being tortured... hands behind my back, gun in my mouth, it doesn't go away.
"The reason I took drugs and alcohol was because I couldn't deal with what my mind was projecting. To get some relief from the nightmares, day and night.
"But then the nightmares started breaking through with a sledge hammer, and once that happened it was a question of giving up the drugs and fighting to get professional help."
The effects of his wrongful conviction went far beyond Conlon and the others who were wrongfully convicted. Prison visits were supervised and any personal details discussed would be spread around by mischievous warders, so they stuck to discussing pleasantries.
"I'd spent months in solitary, in the dark. I'd been beaten, had people defecating in my food, putting glass in my food. I'd seen people murdered. Yet I had to tell my family they were treating me well.
"When you come out you find the relationship with your family during your time inside was built on falsehoods. I didn't know that my mother and my sisters were being strip searched and abused when they came to see me. You can't calculate the devastating effect it has on your family."
As we are speaking Conlon sees a news report on the TV screen behind me about the treatment of the former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohamed.
"Nothing has changed. The Government knew we were being tortured in the 1970s. When I hear about Binyam Mohamed it all comes back. My mind flashes back to the beatings, the threats and the mental cruelty I suffered at the hands of the police."
Conlon has become frustrated by the lack of political will to help victims of miscarriages of justice. The Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (Mojo) was formed by Paddy Hill after he and other members of the Birmingham Six had their convictions quashed in 1991. Mojo is campaigning to have a trauma centre set up dedicated to helping miscarriage of justice victims after they leave prison. They get sympathetic noises from politicians but little action.
In 1997, Conlon was given half a million pounds in compensation. Giving money to victims of miscarriages of justice is likened by Conlon to giving them a "bottle of whisky and a revolver".
"They may as well say: 'here's the money, now go and kill yourself.'
"They gave me £546,000 - for taking me, torturing me and framing me; taking my father, torturing him and having him die in prison; then leaving me sinking in the quicksand of my own nightmares."
In 2005 the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven finally got a personal apology from Tony Blair. Conlon told the then Prime Minister that the apology would only mean something if it came with more help for the victims.
"Blair turned to [parliamentary private secretary] David Hanson and said: 'David, get on to this right away.' Since then we've had no help. We followed up on Tony Blair's promise and were basically told to get lost. He lied to us - the apology means nothing."
"If there was a trauma centre, within a year, you could probably be living a normal productive life rather than being haunted by nightmares."
But picking up the pieces of those who have already been wrongly convicted is cure, rather than prevention. Seeing the mistreatment of suspects and innocent people going to prison makes him feel that Britain has not moved on since the 1970s.
"Back then it was the Irish, now it's Muslims. But nobody is safe, one of the Guildford Four was English. Everyone thinks this happens to other people, but it's closer than you think.
"Who's to say you're not going to be next. Look at Sally Clarke, she was a solicitor and she drank herself to death after she was wrongly convicted of killing her two sons."
What is striking about Conlon is that while he is angry, he is amazingly lacking in bitterness. He is clearly suffering greatly with the horrors of 15 years being treated "worse than a twisted child killer". He wants his case files released; he wants proper post-sentence care for other victims of miscarriages - but he is not consumed by hate.
A common theme he returns to is how trauma counselling is given to people who have experienced what, to him, would seem fairly mild. But every time he mentions another group getting "the best counselling available", he pauses, and slowly emphasises, "and so they should, and so they should. But what about us?"
Conlon is now "full of" psychiatric drugs, and his terrifying flashbacks continue. But through the pain caused by his years in prison he finds some purpose.
"I want my father's death to count for something. It's the hardest thing you can imagine to be put in prison for something you didn't do. If I can do something to stop it happening to other people my life will have meant something."
***
Guildford Four: 10 years on
An injustice that still reverberates
A decade after bombing convictions were quashed, the freed four and the legal system have not found all the answers
After the incredulity and then the euphoria of release from jail, the four people who had served 15 years for the Guildford pub bombings in 1974 had to find a life. Three are now married with families but the years of adjustment have been painful.
Ten years ago today the only thing that mattered was when Lord Lane, the lord chief justice, pronounced those magic words: the convictions of Gerry Conlon, Carole Richardson, Paul Hill and Paddy Armstrong were "unsafe and unsatisfactory".
Conlon, a wild and wiry bundle of suppressed energy with delirious sisters on either arm, was the only one to face the crowds outside the front door of the Old Bailey. He punched the air in defiance and ran the wrong way down the street. Just like a confused animal, his lawyer thought. Conlon was then 35.
Richardson, 17 at the time of her arrest, was shocked and weak at the knees. She and her former boyfriend, Armstrong, disappeared separately out the back. She just wanted to hide. Hill, who was still serving life for a murder in Northern Ireland, was taken to Crumlin Road prison in Belfast and bailed two days later.
Theirs was the first of the momentous Irish miscarriage of justice cases which convulsed the criminal justice system and led to a rare royal commission. The crisis of confidence was encapsulated in one of Lord Lane's concluding remarks: "The officers must have lied."
The ramifications - on disclosure of evidence, the right to silence and to jury trials, the credibility of the police, the quality of forensic services and the question of racism - are still reverberating.
Psychological effects
For the four people who had lost their youth, a personal trauma of equal intensity lay in store. As Gareth Peirce, Gerry Conlon's solicitor, put it: "They come out with no money and no counselling. They have no references, it's difficult to open a bank account, you can't get a mortgage. They have no GP. You don't belong. "
Little things - the pace of life and the gadgetry invented since 1974 - caused panic. They found the noise of traffic and crossing the road frightening. "You're inadequate, you've no skills," said Conlon.
But the most serious effects of 15 years in prison, most of them in category A, was psychological. Three years ago Adrian Grounds, a psychiatrist at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, examined Conlon and four of the Birmingham Six who were released in 1991. He found that they were suffering from irreversible, persistent and disabling post-traumatic stress syndrome. He compared their mental state with that of brain damaged accident victims or people who had suffered war crimes. "It often made them impossible to live with," he said.
Some have fared worse than the others. After some manic trans-Atlantic campaigning for the Birmingham Six and other victims of injustice, Conlon descended into a cocaine haze, from which he is only now emerging. "I've been off it since last November," he says. He is on the dole in a one bedroom flat on the south coast, and seeking the counselling that he realises he needed long ago. "For a while the cocaine took away the nightmares."
Armstrong, 48, tried to settle into work but got caught up in the temptations of drink and gambling. He is now married and living in Dublin with a child. He's unemployed and friends say "just coping".
Hill, 44, who had his Belfast conviction quashed, famously married Courtney Kennedy, the daughter of Robert Kennedy who was assassinated in 1968. They live with their three-year-old child in Washington. But their marriage has had its strains to the extent that they sought help. Richardson, who has kept the lowest profile, has probably emerged the strongest, despite eight years on category A in grim Durham prison. She is happily married with an eight-year-old daughter, says her solicitor Alastair Logan.
All four received ex-gratia compensation payments after several years negotiating with the government's assessor, Sir David Calcutt. Three have agreed a settlement of around £500,000 but Hill's final figure has still to be arrived at. All the solicitors believe Calcutt has been mean with his awards. Oliver Kelly, Hill's Belfast lawyer, describes him as "stingy, uncooperative and inaccessible".
Mr Kelly says: "His assessments fall far short of what a reasonable person would expect. In these cases there should be no penny pinching." Mrs Peirce says his "miserly" approach was the final insult. Mr Logan, for Richardson, believes that Calcutt should have awarded punitive damages.
The case and those that followed contributed to a change of culture in the system. Police and forensic science witnesses were no longer considered infallible. Confessions alone meant risky justice. There was a recognition that terrible mistakes had and could be made. Prosecutors had to be more open and judges more sensitive.
The high point in this sea change, it is widely held, was the 1992 court of appeal judgment in the Judith Ward M62 coach bombing case which delivered a searing indictment of police, crown lawyers and scientists for their failure to disclose relevant material. Twelve soldiers and members of their families, returning to Catterick camp in North Yorkshire, were killed in the explosion.
Retrograde steps
The Conservative government's response was Lord Runciman's royal commission which reported in 1993 - ironically the year of the bungled Stephen Lawrence murder investigation and the appointment of the reactionary home secretary Michael Howard. Its key proposal, a criminal cases review commission, was up and running three years later. Despite early criticism of its lack of independent investigative powers, its robust approach in sending many cases back to the court of appeal has been applauded.
Chris Mullin, now environment minister and the former chairman of the home affairs select committee which championed the Birmingham Six, said the commission was "a large step forward which had to be hard fought for. Most of the changes have been undoubtedly for the better."
But some of the other laws that have flown from its recommendations have been seen as retrograde. Defence barristers and civil liberties groups unanimously criticised the erosion of the right to silence. A judge can now draw adverse inferences from a defendant's refusal to answer police questions, although Mr Mullin argued that it was not unreasonable to expect a person to give an account of themselves if they were innocent. The critics also condemned disclosure rules that say the defence has to reveal its case while the prosecution retains the right to hand over only what it thinks is relevant.
Mrs Peirce says: "The royal commission was illiberal. Things have got worse now as any defence lawyer will tell you."
John Wadham, the director of Liberty, added: "The Guildford Four were the first people detained under the prevention of terrorism act and it is disappointing that this legislation remains in place, despite the peace process and the government's commitment in opposition not to renew it. In addition, the government's proposal to remove the defendants' right to elect jury trial in "either way" cases will add to the number of miscarriages of justice."
Political dynamic
Anne Owers, the director of Justice which campaigned on unpopular cases years before the Guildford appeal, was more sanguine. "On balance I think things have got better," she said. "Juries treat police evidence in a very different way. But there has been a political dynamic with both main parties wanting to be tough on crime that has led to regressive legislation. Now the pendulum now seems to be swinging back because of the impending human rights act."
Reservations about whether the balance on disclosure is right have spawned a phlethora of internal reviews. At the last count these were being conducted by the home office, the Royal Academy of Forensic Scientists, the Criminal Bar Association, the crown prosecution service, the police and the Law Society.
The Guildford Four, who launched this legislative ferment, may be forgiven for still feeling let down and left behind. The state simply hoped they would go away. "The government still owes us an apology," said Gerry Conlon. "We were four nonentities and we were ignored by the establishment. We have been disgustingly dealt with."
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