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