BIRMINGHAM SIX & FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Birmingham Six & Forensic Evidence

Birmingham Six & Forensic Evidence

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the statement “Since the retrial of the Birmingham Six, forensic evidence has been the only uncorroborated evidence allowed in court.”

As the unrelenting technology of our time evolves; it frequently makes you think that it could make our lives better or easier somehow. And to finally come to an understanding; what did not get accomplished before, still did not get done after technology. You still do not have enough time in the day to spend with your kids and get everything done. The agencies' that are enforcing our laws, live this dream everyday, not enough man power or sometimes a budget, not to mention having a heavy burden to prove when dealing with criminals who break the law. This paper will be describing the past and present of criminal identification procedures and some possible solutions to the issues at hand.

What's incontrovertible to understand is that the criminals today are more knowledgeable and believe it or not more educated then they were ten years ago, or even five years ago. Developing now is the well educated, self-assured and at bests the most irritating of individuals. What we see in our county and state jails are the ones that we were meant to catch. Now out of the crowds of gang members and drug addicts are the criminals that have been changing the most in areas of education and knowledge of the new technology; in order to get what it is they needed they had to conform to the new millennium career criminal.

The Birmingham Six were six men—Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker—sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 in the United Kingdom for the Birmingham pub bombings. Their convictions were declared unsafe and overturned by the Court of Appeal on 14 March 1991. The six men were later awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.

The Birmingham pub bombings took place on 21 November 1974 and were attributed to the Provisional IRA. The devices were placed in two central Birmingham pubs: the Mulberry Bush (later renamed, latterly as Bar St Martin, then redeveloped in 2003 as a tourist information office, now being redeveloped again into luxury apartments), at the foot of the Rotunda, and the Tavern in the Town, a basement pub on New Street (later renamed the Yard of Ale). The resulting explosions, at 20:25 and 20:27, collectively were the most injurious and serious terrorist blasts on the island of Great Britain up until that point; 21 people were killed (ten at the Mulberry Bush and eleven at the Tavern in the Town) and 162 people were injured. A third device, outside a bank on Hagley Road, failed to detonate.

Five of the six men arrested were Belfast-born Roman Catholics. John Walker was born in Derry. All six had lived in Birmingham since the 1960s. Five of the men, Hill, Hunter, McIlkenny, Power and ...