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#368 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Birmingham Six · Wrongful Conviction

0:06
Speaker 1: Hey guys, Laura here.
0:08
Speaker 2: Now.
0:08
Speaker 1: Most of the stories we bring you focus on the
0:10
Speaker 1: American criminal justice system, but this one takes place in
0:13
Speaker 1: the UK. The case revolves around in IRA bombing in
0:18
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two and six innocent irishmen who were tortured
0:22
Speaker 1: into falsely confessing to the crime. One of the people
0:25
Speaker 1: working to prove their innocence was a reporter named Chris Mullen.
0:28
Speaker 1: Through his reporting, he found the people he says were
0:31
Speaker 1: the actual IRA members responsible for the bombing, but he
0:35
Speaker 1: refused to give up their names to the police and
0:38
Speaker 1: the matter went to court in March twenty twenty two.
0:41
Speaker 1: The court decided that Mullen did not have to name
0:44
Speaker 1: his source, and even though we want to know who
0:47
Speaker 1: actually committed these crimes, this ruling protects one of the
0:50
Speaker 1: key tenets of journalism. It was only with the promise
0:54
Speaker 1: of anonymity that Mullen was able to get the evidence
0:57
Speaker 1: against the people he says really committed this crime. Keeping
1:00
Speaker 1: those protections in place will help journalists to expose present
1:04
Speaker 1: and future wrongful convictions. Welcome to wrongful conviction, False confessions.
1:16
Speaker 1: I'm Laura, and I writer, and I'm Steve Drisen Steve.
1:21
Speaker 1: When we went on our speaking tour last year for
1:23
Speaker 1: Making a Murderer, one of my favorite places we visited
1:26
Speaker 1: was Belfast in Northern Ireland.
1:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one of the highlights of our travels.
1:32
Speaker 2: It was almost like coming home, coming to a place
1:36
Speaker 2: which understood the work I've been doing for most of
1:40
Speaker 2: my professional life.
1:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was something about false confessions that really resonated
1:45
Speaker 1: with that audience.
1:46
Speaker 2: It's a lived experience and it goes back to the
1:49
Speaker 2: way in which the Birmingham Six were treated by law enforcement.
1:53
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so here's the thing, right. The Birmingham Six
1:56
Speaker 1: was a case that arose from the fact that two
1:58
Speaker 1: pubs in Birmingham were bombed. It was one of the
2:01
Speaker 1: biggest mass murders to happen on British soil after World
2:04
Speaker 1: War Two. I mean, this is like the Oklahoma City
2:07
Speaker 1: bombing here in the United States. And the blame for
2:10
Speaker 1: this crime was placed on these six Irish guys who
2:13
Speaker 1: were living in England but who had deep roots in Belfast.
2:17
Speaker 1: The injustice of what happened to these guys is like
2:19
Speaker 1: almost nothing I've seen before.
2:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, a profound experience of police abuses and of torture
2:26
Speaker 2: in the interrogation rooms.
2:29
Speaker 1: Their story resonates for so many people in Northern Ireland
2:33
Speaker 1: because the whole place has this incredible history of conflict
2:38
Speaker 1: and struggle against power. I actually think that history is
2:42
Speaker 1: what brought so many people out last year to our talk.
2:44
Speaker 3: You know.
2:45
Speaker 1: I'd like to believe they came to see you and me,
2:47
Speaker 1: but they were probably there to hear about injustice and
2:49
Speaker 1: how to fight it. And that's a little bit better
2:52
Speaker 1: of a reason.
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Speaker 2: I think.
3:04
Speaker 1: Our story today begins in Birmingham, England. It's the second
3:08
Speaker 1: largest city in the United Kingdom, with a population in
3:11
Speaker 1: the millions, mostly English, but also hundreds of thousands of Irish.
3:15
Speaker 1: Like any big city, Birmingham's got a thriving social scene.
3:19
Speaker 1: In particular, on almost every corner there's a pub. It's
3:23
Speaker 1: in two of those pubs that our story really begins,
3:26
Speaker 1: two ordinary places where people go after work to get
3:29
Speaker 1: a pint of beer. On November twenty first, nineteen seventy four,
3:33
Speaker 1: two Birmingham pubs became together the scene of Britain's deadliest
3:38
Speaker 1: mass murder in modern history. It all started at eight
3:42
Speaker 1: eleven in the evening, an anonymous man with an Irish
3:46
Speaker 1: accent placed a phone call to the Birmingham Post newspaper.
3:50
Speaker 1: There's a bomb planted in the Rotunda, he said, and
3:54
Speaker 1: there's a bomb in New Street. This, he added, is
3:58
Speaker 1: double X. Then silence he'd hung up. The Rotunda was
4:04
Speaker 1: a high rise office building in downtown Birmingham with a
4:07
Speaker 1: pub on its first floor called the Mulberry Bush. New Street.
4:10
Speaker 1: Around the corner was where the city tax office was.
4:13
Speaker 1: There was a pub on that building's first floor too,
4:16
Speaker 1: called the Tavern in the Town. And then only six
4:20
Speaker 1: minutes after that anonymous phone call, it happened two huge explosions.
4:26
Speaker 1: The first was at the Mulberry Bush at eight seventeen pm.
4:29
Speaker 1: A homemade bomb had been left in a leather bag
4:32
Speaker 1: somewhere near the back door. When the bomb exploded, the
4:35
Speaker 1: pub was packed with people and the damage was horrific.
4:39
Speaker 1: The ceiling collapsed, fire engulfed the place. People were crushed
4:43
Speaker 1: and burned to death. Others were impaled by falling beams.
4:48
Speaker 1: First responders arrived and began working desperately to rescue survivors.
4:52
Speaker 1: At the same time, police were frantically trying to evacuate
4:54
Speaker 1: the Tavern in the town, but they couldn't clear it
4:57
Speaker 1: fast enough. At eight twenty seven pm, a second homemade
5:01
Speaker 1: bomb exploded there again, the packed pub was destroyed. That
5:06
Speaker 1: explosion was so powerful that people were blown through the
5:09
Speaker 1: brick walls between the two pubs. Twenty one people died
5:14
Speaker 1: and one hundred and eighty two were injured. It was
5:17
Speaker 1: a coordinated attack that left Britain reeling. So why would
5:23
Speaker 1: anyone bomb pubs in Birmingham? The answer is politics and history.
5:29
Speaker 1: Here's our friend, doctor Hannah Quirk. She's a professor at
5:32
Speaker 1: King's College, London who studies wrongful convictions and like a
5:36
Speaker 1: lot of folks in the United Kingdom, in Ireland, she
5:39
Speaker 1: had a front row seat to that history. When she's
5:41
Speaker 1: talking to people who are new to this part of
5:43
Speaker 1: the world, Hannah likes to start here.
5:45
Speaker 4: So there's obviously the famous U two song about Bloody Sunday.
5:49
Speaker 1: That song's more than a pop anthem. It tells the
5:51
Speaker 1: story of the long running and sometimes violent conflict between
5:55
Speaker 1: Ireland and Britain. And here's that story in a nutshell.
5:59
Speaker 4: There's a little implicated history in Ireland, hundreds of years
6:03
Speaker 4: of history, but in nineteen twenty two there'd been a
6:06
Speaker 4: civil war and the majority of Ireland was given independence
6:11
Speaker 4: from Great Britain and formed the Irish Free State, but
6:14
Speaker 4: a deal was done to say that the six counties
6:17
Speaker 4: of Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom.
6:20
Speaker 1: Not everyone was happy with this deal, though. People became
6:23
Speaker 1: intensely divided about whether Northern Ireland should be part of
6:27
Speaker 1: the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland, and
6:30
Speaker 1: those divisions often fell along religious lines.
6:33
Speaker 4: Most Catholics were nationalists or Republicans. They wanted to be
6:37
Speaker 4: a United Ireland so the island of Ireland would be
6:40
Speaker 4: one country, and most Protestants were Unionists or Loyalists. They
6:45
Speaker 4: wanted to remain part of Great Britain and be governed
6:48
Speaker 4: from London.
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Speaker 1: Tensions simmered for years, and eventually anti Catholic sentiment started boiling,
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Speaker 1: especially in Northern Ireland.
6:57
Speaker 4: Catholics were very discriminated against. They had for fewer job
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Speaker 4: of unities. The housing was worse, so they were very overcrowded.
7:03
Speaker 4: They couldn't sit on juries for the most part because
7:06
Speaker 4: they didn't own property. Schools were divided on religious lines
7:09
Speaker 4: as well, so the civil rights movement grew in the
7:11
Speaker 4: United States and the Catholic population in Northern Ireland gradually
7:15
Speaker 4: began to protest about discrimination that they were facing. Two
7:18
Speaker 4: British troops had already gone into Northern Ireland to try
7:20
Speaker 4: and keep the peace, and then Bloody Sunday in nineteen
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Speaker 4: seventy two British paratroopers opened fire on the protesters and
7:26
Speaker 4: killed thirteen people and injured fifteen of them.
7:30
Speaker 1: After Bloody Sunday, the violence really escalated on both sides.
7:34
Speaker 1: People who wanted to end British rule in Northern Ireland
7:37
Speaker 1: armed themselves and became active in a group called the
7:40
Speaker 1: Irish Republican Army or the IRA.
7:43
Speaker 4: That song people always said it was the best recruitment
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Speaker 4: thing the IRA could ever have had. Bloody Sunday I
7:49
Speaker 4: think was a real tipping point. It got so much attention,
7:52
Speaker 4: not only in Northern Ireland but in England as well.
7:54
Speaker 4: These images of the army shooting unarmed protesters.
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Speaker 1: The IRA they thought of themselves as freedom fighters and
8:02
Speaker 1: they used violence to make their point, even planting homemade
8:05
Speaker 1: bombs all across Britain. The IRA targeted everything from government
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Speaker 1: tax offices to restaurants and pubs. By nineteen seventy four,
8:14
Speaker 1: two years after Bloody Sunday. Britain was experiencing an average
8:18
Speaker 1: of one attack every three days, and British authorities were
8:22
Speaker 1: regularly retaliating. The conflict was pretty close to a war,
8:26
Speaker 1: and it became known as the Troubles.
8:29
Speaker 4: I mean we called it the Troubles. When I was
8:31
Speaker 4: growing up, that was all I heard on the news
8:33
Speaker 4: was the Troubles. And then the first time I went
8:35
Speaker 4: to Belfast, I realized no, actually this was this was
8:39
Speaker 4: like a war. They were appalling levels of casualties in
8:42
Speaker 4: those days as well, before the internet, you'd get newsflashes
8:45
Speaker 4: on the television, so the screen would go black and
8:47
Speaker 4: they'd say we interrupt this program, and it would be
8:49
Speaker 4: a bomb had gone off, or you know, some kind
8:52
Speaker 4: of serious situation had taken place. For years, there's been
8:55
Speaker 4: no trush comes on public transport in London, just to
8:58
Speaker 4: stop people being able to hide bomb. I was probably
9:01
Speaker 4: about eight or nine and my mom had taken me
9:04
Speaker 4: and all my cousins and my little brother to buy
9:07
Speaker 4: school uniforms and there was this announcement over the tannoy
9:11
Speaker 4: please evacuate the store, and the alarms going off. We
9:14
Speaker 4: just thought it was a brilliant adventure. Because we were
9:16
Speaker 4: a bit too little to realize it could be quite dangerous,
9:19
Speaker 4: and my poor mum was just trying to grab about
9:21
Speaker 4: eight children and get us out of the store, but
9:23
Speaker 4: it was all glass of front, so she didn't know
9:25
Speaker 4: which way to take us and which was more dangerous.
9:27
Speaker 4: So we just always laughed about how we all had
9:30
Speaker 4: nail marks in our arms from where she was digging
9:32
Speaker 4: her fingers in and dragging us out by the hair.
9:34
Speaker 4: And it seemed like a bit of an adventure at
9:36
Speaker 4: the time, but that kind of stuff was quite normal.
9:39
Speaker 1: Here's just how normal these bombings had become. The IRA
9:43
Speaker 1: had rules, and under its rules, IRA members who bombed
9:47
Speaker 1: a civilian target had to call British police and warned
9:50
Speaker 1: them thirty minutes before the bomb went off. The idea
9:54
Speaker 1: was to give enough time for police to evacuate as
9:56
Speaker 1: many people as possible without sacrificing the bombs pltical point,
10:01
Speaker 1: but the British police needed a way to make sure
10:03
Speaker 1: these anonymous phone calls were authentic not hoaxes. So the
10:07
Speaker 1: IRA and the police agreed on a codeword known only
10:11
Speaker 1: to them. If the caller used the codeword, you could
10:14
Speaker 1: be sure the bomb threat was real, and that codeword
10:17
Speaker 1: was double X. On the day the bombs went off,
10:21
Speaker 1: tensions between the IRA and the British were sky high.
10:24
Speaker 1: A week before, an IRA member named James McDade was
10:28
Speaker 1: killed in Britain when a bomb he was placing went
10:31
Speaker 1: off prematurely. IRA sympathizers in Britain were planning a hero's
10:35
Speaker 1: funeral with military processions and honor guards, but the British
10:39
Speaker 1: authorities quickly passed laws and making those plans illegal instead.
10:44
Speaker 1: On November twenty first, mcdade's body was flown from Birmingham
10:48
Speaker 1: to Belfast for burial. Only hours after the plane carrying
10:51
Speaker 1: his body took off, the bombs went off too. Between
10:56
Speaker 1: the timing of the bombings and the use of the
10:58
Speaker 1: double X codeword, it didn't take long for the police
11:01
Speaker 1: and the public to conclude that the IRA was responsible. Now,
11:05
Speaker 1: it's true the anonymous caller hadn't given the usual thirty
11:08
Speaker 1: minutes advanced warning, but that fact got ignored as a
11:12
Speaker 1: wave of anti Irish anger swept over Britain. The IRA
11:17
Speaker 1: issued a denial, but no one listened. The British public
11:20
Speaker 1: was terrified and the British authorities were enraged, there was
11:24
Speaker 1: a thirst for justice and revenge. Within hours of the bombings,
11:30
Speaker 1: police got a tip five Irish men had been seen
11:34
Speaker 1: boarding a train that left Birmingham right before the explosion
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Speaker 1: at the Mulberry Bush. Four of them had tickets continuing
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Speaker 1: on to Belfast in Northern Ireland. Their names were Jerry Hunter,
11:45
Speaker 1: Dick Mackilkenny, John Walker, Billy Power and Patti Hill. They
11:50
Speaker 1: were what the Irish call working class lads who didn't
11:53
Speaker 1: have a lot of extra money. All five men were Catholic,
11:56
Speaker 1: all were married, and most of them had kids. None
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Speaker 1: of them was affiliated with the IRA. They were headed
12:02
Speaker 1: to Belfast to attend James mcdade's funeral, but more out
12:05
Speaker 1: of community obligation than for political reasons. For his part,
12:09
Speaker 1: Patty Hill borrowed his train fare from a nun. He
12:12
Speaker 1: promised to pay her back by doing some painting work
12:15
Speaker 1: when he returned, but that debt would soon become the
12:18
Speaker 1: least of his problems.
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Speaker 5: This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company,
12:32
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12:45
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13:02
Speaker 5: of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal
13:05
Speaker 5: justice area.
13:13
Speaker 1: For the first few hours, the train ride was uneventful,
13:16
Speaker 1: but when the train pulled up to Morecambe's station on
13:19
Speaker 1: the evening of November twenty first, the police were waiting
13:22
Speaker 1: a group of irishmen leaving Birmingham just as the bombs
13:25
Speaker 1: went off, seemed suspicious. All five were arrested and brought
13:29
Speaker 1: to a nearby police department. That's where a forensic scientist
13:33
Speaker 1: tested their hands for traces of nitroglycerin, a bomb ingredient.
13:37
Speaker 1: The hands of two men tested positive, the scientists said,
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Speaker 1: Billy Power and Patty Hill. That was enough for the police.
13:46
Speaker 1: Not just justice, but revenge was suddenly possible. Within a day,
13:50
Speaker 1: police arrested a sixth Irishman, Hugh Callahan, who had been
13:54
Speaker 1: with the other five before they boarded the train, and
13:57
Speaker 1: the interrogations endured by these six men, the Birmingham Six,
14:01
Speaker 1: were horrific. It started at the Morcambe Police Department with
14:06
Speaker 1: John Walker. A group of police took John into a
14:09
Speaker 1: back room where he was beaten, kicked, and burned with
14:12
Speaker 1: a cigarette while other officers held his arms back. The
14:16
Speaker 1: other men heard John screaming, and then their turns came too.
14:20
Speaker 1: For hours, they were all bloodied and beaten from head
14:23
Speaker 1: to toe. One of them, Billy Power, was kicked over
14:27
Speaker 1: and over on his head, legs, and stomach. He was
14:30
Speaker 1: dragged by his hair and in one of the most
14:32
Speaker 1: sadistic moments of this interrogation, police stretched his scrotum.
14:37
Speaker 2: During these interrogations, at least some of these guys were
14:40
Speaker 2: shown a letter, a letter that said that the torture
14:44
Speaker 2: they were experiencing was state sanctioned. It was a letter
14:48
Speaker 2: on government letterhead that basically told the police officers, you
14:52
Speaker 2: can do whatever you need to do in order to
14:56
Speaker 2: get a confession from these men. To these guys, message
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Speaker 2: was this pain, this torture is going to continue unless
15:05
Speaker 2: you confess.
15:07
Speaker 1: By twelve fifty five pm the next day, November twenty second,
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Speaker 1: Billy had had enough he signed a written confession prepared
15:15
Speaker 1: by police, admitting guilt in the Birmingham pub bombings. A
15:18
Speaker 1: few hours later, the men were transferred to the custody
15:21
Speaker 1: of another police unit, the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad,
15:25
Speaker 1: where the torture continued. Beatings, burnings, stress positions, even mock executions.
15:32
Speaker 1: Patty Hill remembers having a pistol shoved into his mouth
15:35
Speaker 1: so brutally that it broke several of his teeth. With
15:39
Speaker 1: a cold metal barrel in Patty's mouth, his interrogators slowly
15:43
Speaker 1: counted to three and pulled the trigger three times. They
15:47
Speaker 1: did this each time Patty expected to die, only to
15:51
Speaker 1: discover that the chamber didn't contain a bullet. The thing
15:54
Speaker 1: about torture is that it works, at least if your
15:57
Speaker 1: only goal is to find a scapegoat. A November twenty third,
16:01
Speaker 1: Hugh Callahan, Dick Mcelekenny, and John Walker signed false confessions.
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Speaker 1: Like Billy, they claimed that they were IRA members and
16:09
Speaker 1: that they'd planted both pub bombs. Somehow, Patty Hill and
16:13
Speaker 1: Jerry Hunter were holdouts. They refused to sign confessions despite
16:17
Speaker 1: the torture. Police would later claim that Patty and Jerry
16:20
Speaker 1: verbally confessed, which Patty denies. The four written confessions were
16:24
Speaker 1: short and virtually detail free. In fact, one of the
16:27
Speaker 1: only details included was wrong. The confessions claimed that the
16:31
Speaker 1: bombs were left at the pubs in white plastic bags,
16:34
Speaker 1: but forensic analysis showed the bags had been leather. It
16:37
Speaker 1: didn't matter. Four of the Birmingham six had confessed, and
16:41
Speaker 1: all of them had been beaten within an inch of
16:43
Speaker 1: their lives. Revenge, it seemed, had been achieved.
16:48
Speaker 2: The last thing that you want interrogators to do when
16:51
Speaker 2: they go into an interrogation room is to be guided
16:55
Speaker 2: by a sense of vengeance, because what's going to happen
17:00
Speaker 2: and is the interrogator is going to do everything in
17:02
Speaker 2: his power to quench that thirst for revenge, and the
17:07
Speaker 2: interrogation no longer becomes about the truth.
17:11
Speaker 1: After the confessions, the six were charged with murder and
17:14
Speaker 1: transferred to Winston Green Prison, where guards continued the beatings.
17:18
Speaker 1: When the Birmingham Six were finally brought to court a
17:21
Speaker 1: week after the bombings, they'd been brutalized from head to foot.
17:26
Speaker 1: Patty Hill's wife was in the courtroom with their two
17:28
Speaker 1: year old son. When the little boy saw his dad's injuries.
17:31
Speaker 1: He was so traumatized that he needed medical attention. But
17:35
Speaker 1: authorities told the judge they had done nothing wrong. The
17:38
Speaker 1: men had been attacked, they said, by other inmates.
17:41
Speaker 2: We've seen excuses like that over and over again, even
17:45
Speaker 2: in the United States. When somebody is battered, the police
17:48
Speaker 2: changed the narrative from the beginning. They either blame it
17:52
Speaker 2: on somebody falling down the stairs, or they blame it
17:55
Speaker 2: on other inmates. But when these men appeared in court
17:59
Speaker 2: for the first time, everybody knew what had happened to them.
18:02
Speaker 2: It was clear that they had been through an ordeal.
18:07
Speaker 1: That ordeal was far from over. Based on the confessions
18:11
Speaker 1: and the nitroglycerin evidence, the Birmingham Six stood trial on
18:15
Speaker 1: June ninth, nineteen seventy five. A defense expert testified that
18:19
Speaker 1: the explosives testing had been faulty, and defense witnesses pointed
18:22
Speaker 1: out that no explosives had been found at any of
18:25
Speaker 1: the men's homes, but in short order that Birmingham Six
18:29
Speaker 1: were convicted. Each man was sentenced to twenty one life sentences,
18:34
Speaker 1: one for every person who died, and the people of Britain,
18:39
Speaker 1: all of whom thought it could have been them inside
18:41
Speaker 1: those pubs. They believed that justice had been done from
18:47
Speaker 1: behind bars. The Birmingham Six fought their convictions like furies
18:51
Speaker 1: and insisted the authorities acknowledged they'd been tortured, but for
18:55
Speaker 1: a while it looked like the entire system was lined
18:58
Speaker 1: up against them. Eventually, fourteen prison officers were charged with
19:03
Speaker 1: assaulting the six, but despite plenty of evidence, those officers
19:06
Speaker 1: were all acquitted at trial. The six also tried to
19:10
Speaker 1: soothe their torturers, but a judge dismissed their lawsuit in
19:14
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty and he did it for reasons that you
19:16
Speaker 1: have to hear to believe. Just think what it would
19:19
Speaker 1: mean for Britain's legal system. The judge explained, if these
19:23
Speaker 1: men were allowed to prove they'd been tortured, it would
19:26
Speaker 1: mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they
19:29
Speaker 1: were guilty of violence and threats, and that the convictions
19:33
Speaker 1: were erroneous. That was such an appalling vista. He declared
19:38
Speaker 1: that every sensible person would say, it cannot be right
19:41
Speaker 1: that this lawsuit should go any further.
19:44
Speaker 2: You know, the appalling vista here is this paternalistic attitude
19:48
Speaker 2: of this judge that the public can't handle the truth
19:52
Speaker 2: he's saying that if this torture were allowed to be
19:55
Speaker 2: seen by them, if this injustice were allowed to be acknowledged,
20:00
Speaker 2: the entire system would crumble. The irony is that by
20:04
Speaker 2: suppressing the truth, by putting these allegations in evidence of
20:09
Speaker 2: torture in the closet, he is breaking the very system
20:14
Speaker 2: he claims to want to protect. Where are these men
20:18
Speaker 2: supposed to get justice if not in a court of law.
20:23
Speaker 1: But while the court system closed its eyes to this injustice,
20:27
Speaker 1: the world didn't. Journalist Chris Mullen, who would go on
20:30
Speaker 1: to become a member of Parliament, investigated the bombings with
20:34
Speaker 1: fresh eyes. In nineteen eighty five, he retained two scientists
20:38
Speaker 1: who debunked the test that supposedly had found nitroglycerin on
20:42
Speaker 1: Patty and Billy's hands. A police officer also publicly confirmed
20:46
Speaker 1: that the Birmingham Six had been beaten by their interrogators.
20:50
Speaker 1: The next year, Chris Mullen published a book about the
20:52
Speaker 1: case called Error of Judgment. In the book, Mullen described
20:56
Speaker 1: meeting IRA members who admitted they were involved in the bombings,
21:01
Speaker 1: although he didn't disclose their names, and Mullen explained something
21:06
Speaker 1: that had been a mystery for years why the double
21:09
Speaker 1: X caller hadn't given the full thirty minutes warning before
21:13
Speaker 1: the first explosion. Turns out the bombers meant to give
21:16
Speaker 1: police thirty minutes, but the telephone booth they'd planned to
21:20
Speaker 1: use had been damaged by vandals. By the time they
21:23
Speaker 1: found another phone, only six minutes were left. The warning
21:26
Speaker 1: system wasn't as fool proof as they thought. That was
21:30
Speaker 1: how these bombings became one of the deadliest mass murders
21:33
Speaker 1: in modern British history. In nineteen eighty seven, advocates, including
21:49
Speaker 1: renowned civil rights lawyer Gareth Pearce, convinced a court to
21:54
Speaker 1: re examine the convictions of the Birmingham Six. At the hearing,
21:57
Speaker 1: police officers testified about why their colleagues torture the six men.
22:02
Speaker 1: Evidence was also introduced about a handwritten chart that had
22:06
Speaker 1: been found in the police station. The interrogators apparently used
22:09
Speaker 1: this chart to line up the facts in the different
22:12
Speaker 1: men's statements and make sure they matched. Of course, those
22:16
Speaker 1: facts were actually lies.
22:18
Speaker 2: The discovery of this chart basically proved what the men
22:21
Speaker 2: had been saying all along, that we didn't confess to
22:25
Speaker 2: these crimes. These were stories that were scripted by the police,
22:31
Speaker 2: and we were tortured into saying what they wanted us
22:35
Speaker 2: to say.
22:36
Speaker 1: But despite this new evidence, relief was denied and the
22:39
Speaker 1: case stalled for four years until a second hearing was granted.
22:44
Speaker 1: There new evidence was introduced that further undermined the nitroglycerin
22:47
Speaker 1: testing on Patty and Billy's hands. But what finally tipped
22:51
Speaker 1: the balance, as Gareth Pierce later wrote, it was the
22:55
Speaker 1: simplest of stupidities. Previously, police had testified that the men
22:59
Speaker 1: confessed freely and that after they confessed, their stories never changed.
23:04
Speaker 1: But Pierce had found the notebooks on which the men's
23:07
Speaker 1: confessions had been written. Sure enough, as the police wrote, edited,
23:12
Speaker 1: and rewrote the false confessions on notebook pages, their pens
23:16
Speaker 1: left indentations on the pages. Underneath those indentations revealed how
23:21
Speaker 1: the stories had evolved and been altered, and how the
23:24
Speaker 1: police's testimony had been false.
23:27
Speaker 2: These indentations were like track changes, you know. They were
23:32
Speaker 2: imprints on paper that were left because the police officers
23:36
Speaker 2: were writing and rewriting so furiously that they left a
23:40
Speaker 2: mark on the paper. Evidence that the confessions were scripted
23:45
Speaker 2: is evidence of police contamination. That the story didn't come
23:50
Speaker 2: from the defendants. It came from police officers.
23:54
Speaker 1: All six convictions were declared unsafe that's a British term,
23:58
Speaker 1: and thrown out, and on November twenty first, nineteen ninety one,
24:03
Speaker 1: the Birmingham Six walked out of prison after sixteen years
24:07
Speaker 1: behind bars.
24:09
Speaker 4: Still makes the hairs on the back of your neck
24:11
Speaker 4: stands on end, doesn't it. I remember it really vividly,
24:14
Speaker 4: that image of them walking out of the court onto
24:17
Speaker 4: the street, and builders hanging off scaffolding from the buildings
24:21
Speaker 4: across the road, people packed outside, these hundreds and hundreds
24:25
Speaker 4: of people, TV crews from around the world, and then
24:28
Speaker 4: that amazing image of them all coming out, linked hands
24:32
Speaker 4: holding them above their heads, with Chris Mullin, the journalist
24:35
Speaker 4: who had campaigned for them, and then Paddy grabbing the
24:38
Speaker 4: microphone and shouting how he'd spent sixteen years in prison
24:42
Speaker 4: for a crime he didn't commit. It was that really
24:45
Speaker 4: raw emotion that was just so shocking. The police tore
24:49
Speaker 4: us from the start that they knew we hadn't done it.
24:53
Speaker 4: They told us they didn't care who'd done it. They
24:55
Speaker 4: told us that we.
24:56
Speaker 2: Were selected and that they were gone.
24:58
Speaker 4: A frayrom us they came the people in their happy
25:02
Speaker 4: let's w a tullify justice. I don't think them people
25:10
Speaker 4: enough got the intelligence, no, the honors in a.
25:13
Speaker 2: Spell award, never mind dispensive.
25:17
Speaker 1: The six won their freedom years ago, but even today
25:21
Speaker 1: real justice still seems illusory. There's never been a formal
25:25
Speaker 1: declaration of innocence or exoneration. Even the court decision throwing
25:30
Speaker 1: out their convictions still made veiled references to their possible guilt.
25:34
Speaker 1: The closest the Birmingham Six has come to justice was
25:37
Speaker 1: when they won a defamation lawsuit after a member of
25:40
Speaker 1: Parliament called them guilty. The British government has compensated them financially,
25:45
Speaker 1: but the amount doesn't come close to repaying them for
25:48
Speaker 1: days of torture and sixteen lost years.
25:51
Speaker 4: A psychiatrist assessed the six when they put in their
25:55
Speaker 4: claim for compensation, and he said they had post traumatic
25:58
Speaker 4: stress to sodia that was on the level of somebody
26:00
Speaker 4: who had been in a war zone. I think what
26:03
Speaker 4: they'd been through was exceptional given the violence that they'd suffered,
26:06
Speaker 4: as well as the miscarriage of justice. I mean, they
26:09
Speaker 4: had been tortured, they'd had to fight and fight all
26:12
Speaker 4: the time in prison for their own safety and fight
26:16
Speaker 4: to prove their innocence. If you've had that level of
26:18
Speaker 4: adrenaline running through your system for sixteen years, that doesn't
26:22
Speaker 4: just disappear when you walk out of court.
26:25
Speaker 1: And as for the bombing, it's never been definitively solved.
26:28
Speaker 1: In fact, over the past few years, there's been an
26:31
Speaker 1: ongoing inquest in Birmingham to reinvestigate what happened that day.
26:35
Speaker 1: For years, Chris Mullen refused to name the men he
26:38
Speaker 1: said had accepted responsibility, citing his journalistic obligation to protect sources.
26:44
Speaker 1: Right before the inquest, Mullen finally published an article identifying
26:48
Speaker 1: two former IRA members who are now dead. For its part,
26:52
Speaker 1: the IRA has never officially admitted responsibility for the bombings.
26:57
Speaker 1: At the inquest, one former IRA member and if i'd
27:00
Speaker 1: only as witness O, named the same perpetrators that Mullin
27:04
Speaker 1: had named, plus two others. Another witness testified that the
27:07
Speaker 1: high body count was accidental and described the bombings as
27:11
Speaker 1: an IRA operation that went badly wrong in some ways,
27:15
Speaker 1: though the system has tried to learn from its mistakes.
27:18
Speaker 4: If you were writing a history of the criminal justice
27:20
Speaker 4: system in this country, the Birmingham Six is a real
27:24
Speaker 4: tipping point. It wasn't about the politics of Northern Ireland.
27:28
Speaker 4: It was about the criminal justice system has done something
27:31
Speaker 4: terribly wrong. So there was a real sense at the
27:33
Speaker 4: time that the system was in crisis. People couldn't have
27:36
Speaker 4: confidence in the system because there were so many wrongful
27:39
Speaker 4: convictions happening. And on the day the Birmingham Six were
27:42
Speaker 4: released from prison, the Home Secretary stood up in Parliament
27:46
Speaker 4: and said, I'm ordering a commission to look into the
27:48
Speaker 4: criminal justice system.
27:50
Speaker 1: Based on that commission's recommendation, the UK created the Criminal
27:54
Speaker 1: Cases Review Commission in nineteen ninety seven.
27:57
Speaker 4: The Criminal Cases Review Commission is independent, but it's funded
28:01
Speaker 4: by the government to investigate cases like this and to
28:04
Speaker 4: see where mischaracters of justice have happened. The CCRC isn't perfect,
28:08
Speaker 4: but it's a remarkable organization. It's one of the few
28:12
Speaker 4: places in the world where, to be honest, the government
28:15
Speaker 4: has been big enough to say things do go wrong
28:17
Speaker 4: and we need to create a way of putting this right,
28:21
Speaker 4: and every country should have one.
28:23
Speaker 1: In addition, the UK has adopted reforms around the way
28:26
Speaker 1: suspects are interrogated outlying not only physical torture, but also
28:30
Speaker 1: other tools of coercion, like lying to suspects. These are
28:34
Speaker 1: reforms that we should be enacting in the United States.
28:37
Speaker 2: I always say that the UK is thirty five years
28:41
Speaker 2: ahead of where we are in the United States. As
28:43
Speaker 2: far as interrogation reforms, they don't allow any confessions to
28:49
Speaker 2: be admitted into evidence that are obtained by oppression, and
28:53
Speaker 2: oppression doesn't mean just physical torture. It also means psychological
29:00
Speaker 2: torture and the use of tactics which are likely to
29:05
Speaker 2: render a confession unreliable. All of these reforms are aimed
29:11
Speaker 2: at getting the truth and not just getting a confession.
29:16
Speaker 1: The British legal system wasn't the only one to initiate
29:19
Speaker 1: meaningful change. Patti Hill used the compensation he got for
29:22
Speaker 1: his wrongful conviction to start a nonprofit, the Miscarriages of
29:26
Speaker 1: Justice Organization. Its mission is to help people recently released
29:30
Speaker 1: from prison to get back on their feet and to
29:32
Speaker 1: help them handle the pain and anger they'll probably carry
29:36
Speaker 1: for a long time.
29:37
Speaker 2: There's this incredible caring side to Patty. He talks about
29:42
Speaker 2: when people get out of prison, many of them seek
29:45
Speaker 2: him out, and at least pre COVID he would welcome
29:48
Speaker 2: them in his home, and those are the people that
29:52
Speaker 2: give him the greatest comfort in life because they shared
29:56
Speaker 2: at least some of the experience that he had when
29:59
Speaker 2: he was in prison.
30:01
Speaker 1: You know, when I went back to Scotland last year,
30:04
Speaker 1: I went to visit Patti Hill.
30:05
Speaker 2: I'm so sad that I missed that opportunity.
30:09
Speaker 1: He's an incredible man, but also he is angry still
30:12
Speaker 1: and committed through that anger to improving the system. All
30:17
Speaker 1: he wants to do is remember what happened to him
30:22
Speaker 1: and then use that memory as fuel to change the system.
30:27
Speaker 1: For Patty, all of those physical wounds have long since healed,
30:31
Speaker 1: but the emotional wounds and the drive that he has
30:35
Speaker 1: to make sure this doesn't happen again, those are there forever.
30:38
Speaker 2: We see that time and again with people who are exonerated.
30:42
Speaker 2: They want to tell their story. They want the world
30:45
Speaker 2: to know what happened to them so it doesn't happen again.
30:52
Speaker 3: Hello, Hello, Patty, Hello Laura. How are you doing? Patty?
30:58
Speaker 1: Oh good? So give us a year ago when I
31:02
Speaker 1: saw you in Glasgow at the Mojo offices. Yeah, when
31:07
Speaker 1: you work with the families of other people who are
31:09
Speaker 1: in prison, is there anything to say to them to
31:11
Speaker 1: give them hope.
31:13
Speaker 3: I tell their families they're gonna have good moods. They're
31:16
Speaker 3: gonna have bad moods, you know, And I tell them move,
31:19
Speaker 3: You're not on your own. We can mess in the
31:21
Speaker 3: mood in any way. That's the main thing, you know.
31:25
Speaker 3: You often hear that old cliche time is a great healer?
31:29
Speaker 1: Is it true?
31:30
Speaker 3: Believe me, Time does not heal nothing. The only thing
31:34
Speaker 3: you can hope for is that every day, Please God,
31:38
Speaker 3: you've learned down with a little bit better.
31:42
Speaker 1: Do you have a support system people to help you
31:45
Speaker 1: on those bad days.
31:46
Speaker 3: When I meet up with some of the guys from
31:48
Speaker 3: the geom and one of the pubs and well being
31:51
Speaker 3: be there for five six hours, that's when the barriers
31:55
Speaker 3: come down.
31:55
Speaker 1: You can be yourself, all yourself maybe exactly.
31:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, good time.
32:09
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for
32:13
Speaker 1: Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special
32:17
Speaker 1: thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis.
32:22
Speaker 1: Our production team is headed by senior producer and Pope,
32:25
Speaker 1: along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show
32:28
Speaker 1: is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern.
32:33
Speaker 1: Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow
32:36
Speaker 1: me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I Wrider,
32:39
Speaker 1: and you.
32:39
Speaker 2: Can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
32:43
Speaker 1: For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
32:46
Speaker 1: dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram
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Speaker 1: at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
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Speaker 1: on Twitter at wrong Conviction