British Police, Courts Under Fire

Britain’s vaunted judicial system and its national police force are undergoing an extensive royal investigation as a result of the long, wrongful imprisonment of suspected members of the Irish Republican Army.

Doubts about the veracity of police testimony in two cases, which have attracted national attention here, have cast a cloud over British law enforcement in a fashion not unlike what has happened to the Los Angeles Police Department.

“There is a serious crisis of confidence among the public in our judicial system,” said Chris Mullin, the Labor Party member of Parliament who had led the fight to free the falsely accused “Birmingham Six.”

“If these defense witnesses are telling the truth, the police have engaged in the greatest conspiracy in our trial annals,” Mullin said in an interview.

In the British cases, the police are not accused of beating suspects--the focus of the controversy in the Rodney G. King case in Los Angeles. Instead, there are major questions about law enforcement officers marshaling false evidence against individuals charged with terror bombings in the English cities of Birmingham and Guildford.

In the fall of 1974, explosives were planted in pubs in Guildford, southwest of London, in the center of a large concentration of military bases, and in Birmingham, Britain’s second city. In all, 26 people were killed and more than 200 injured. The British public was outraged.

British police quickly rounded up four suspects in the Guildford case and six in the Birmingham attack. They were put on trial, with the main evidence against the alleged IRA bombers being traces of explosives found on some and the confessions made by others.

But, it later developed, the laboratory tests for explosives were flawed; the confessions had been made under duress in police custody.

Further, it was asserted on appeal that the police had manufactured clumsy evidence against the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.

Neither the elaborate mechanism of the Department of Public Prosecutions, nor police supervisors, nor the lawyers, nor the judges in the trial questioned the flimsy evidence. And the 10 accused, in separate trials, were sentenced to long prison terms.

Luckily for the prisoners, they had defenders outside the bureaucracy: Author Robert Key wrote a book about the Guildford Four; Mullin, then a journalist, wrote “Error of Judgment” about the Birmingham Six. Both authors concluded there had been an extraordinary miscarriage of British justice. And in the Guildford case, police apparently later received confessions by men who actually planted the bomb. Still, they did not free the Guildford Four.

The books and subsequent investigations led to the release of both sets of defendants. The Birmingham Six were freed only last month--four years after an appeals court in 1987 refused to accept fresh evidence of scientific errors and police coercion.

The release of the Birmingham Six--who the courts said had wrongfully served 16 years in prison--prompted the recent appointment of a Royal Commission to conduct a wide-ranging, two-year review of the judicial system, with particular reference to miscarriages of justice.