Guildford Four

The Guildford Four were Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Patrick (Paddy) Armstrong and Carole Richardson, who were wrongly convicted in the United Kingdom in October 1975 for the Provisional IRA's Guildford pub bombing which killed five and injured sixty five people. They were imprisoned for over 15 years. On February 9, 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued an apology to the families and those still alive of the eleven imprisoned for the bombings in Guildford and Woolwich, saying in part that "I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and injustice (…) they deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated."

Further evidence and a final appeal

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

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An appeal was granted on the basis of this new evidence. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, said the police had either;

Related Topics:
Lord Chief Justice - Lord Lane

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

Either way, the police had lied, and the conclusion was if they had lied about this, the entire evidence was misleading and the Four were released.

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Paul Hill, however, stayed in prison until 1994, when another conviction of his (for murdering a British soldier in Northern Ireland) was overturned.

Related Topics:
1994 - British - Northern Ireland

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Several family members of Gerry Conlon, including his father Giuseppe, his aunt and his 14- and 16-year-old cousins (the Maguire Seven), were also imprisoned in the same case (mainly for explosives offences). Giuseppe Conlon died in prison.

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