THE BIRMINGHAM SIX

The Birmingham Six

The Birmingham Six

Introduction

The Birmingham Six were Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for two pub bombings in Birmingham on November 21, 1974 that killed 21 people. Their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal on March 14, 1991. (The Birmingham Six and Other Cases 1997)

Discussion

On May 12, 1975 the six men were charged with murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Three other men, James Kelly, Michael Murray and Michael Sheehan, were charged with conspiracy and Kelly and Sheehan also faced charges of unlawful possession of explosives.

The trial began on June 9, 1975 in Lancaster. After legal arguments the statements the men had made in November were deemed admissible as evidence. The accused repudiated the confessions at the trial. The other evidence against the men was largely circumstantial, through their association with IRA members. Although Hill and Power had tested positive for the Griess test for handling explosives the later sample tests were inconclusive. The jury found the six men guilty of murder and on August 15, 1975 they were sentenced to life terms. In March 1976 their appeal was dismissed. (http://www.portia.org)

Their third appeal, in 1991, was successful. New evidence of police fabrication and suppression of evidence, the discrediting of both the confessions and the 1975 forensic evidence led to the Crown offering no case against the men. In 2001 the six men were awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.

The six men, by then known as the Birmingham Six were forced to sign statements. They claimed to have been threatened, beaten and tortured during the investigations and even showed up in court with visible bruises and other signs of ill-treatment. The lesions of the men are well described by a physician who examined them at the end of November and the beatings are reported by a fellow prisoner to a reporter after his release in December 1974. Several charges were made against individual warders and the police without convictions. (http://www.innocent.org.uk)

Besides their forced statements there was no hard evidence linking the Birmingham Six to the Birmingham bombings. The confessions were inconsistent with one another and with the forensic findings at the sites. Nevertheless they were admitted by the judge. An important test, the Griess Test which test for handling explosives, initially returned a positive result. Attempts to reproduce this result however failed. Despite the shaky forensic evidence the jury found the six guilty of murder and they were sentenced to life imprisonment in August 1975.

Several appeals were filed and finally, the third attempt in 1991 succeeded. The court deemed the evidence fabricated by the police and the Birmingham Six were discharged and released on 14 March 1991.

The devastated lives of the Birmingham Six are memorised in songs like Streets of Sorrow. As far as we know there are no songs memorising the victims who lost their lives on a night out. (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk)

As for the first £50,000 each of the Birmingham ...