'Not to be shown to the defense'

History no obstacle for Hollywood - In the Name of the Father - Fair Comment
Insight on the News
by Richard Grenier

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n12_v10/ai_15235108

Among the most nominated movies for an Academy Award -- after Holocaust-inspired Schindler's List -- is In the Name of the Father, a film bristling with Irish politics and the Irish Republican Army. Were the nominations for In the Name of the Father perhaps influenced by the fact that its heroes, "the Guildford Four," include Paul Hill, a nephew by marriage of Sen. Ted Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, our ambassador to Dublin? Hill is to I have heard on appeal in Belfast his conviction for abduction and murder of a former British soldier -- an event entirely separate from the Guildford incident. But the point is, In the Name of the Father doesn't appeal to an Irish-American constituency so much as a moral constituency.

In our time the sacred mission of journalists, academics and the arts is to struggle against injustice. The complacent assumption -- most silly when we get to Hollywood -- is that these people are able to determine, first, precisely what's unjust and, more important, precisely what to do about it. But the thirst for justice is so strong that these people will struggle against injustice even when there might be no injustice to start. I offer you the Guildford Four.

This is no minor legal squabble, but one of the longest and most bitterly contested chapters in the annals of British justice. In 1974, the IRA, all puffed up with new Libyan support, committed a series of pub bombings in England which left 40 innocent people dead, hundreds wounded and produced a national uproar. The first of these pub bombings occurred at Guildford. The Guildford Four, including the Kennedy nephew, were convicted in relation to this incident and received long prison sentences.

But the Guildford Four later won their freedom on what many believe to be a technicality -- mainly that the notes of their interrogation were not "contemporaneous" and that their guilty verdict was consequently "unsafe." Then the three detectives who had conducted the interrogation of the Guildford Four were put on trial, and they, too, were found not guilty. So, both sides were not guilty.

One of the Guildford Four, Gerry Conlon, wrote a book; director Jim Sheridan (of My Left Foot fame) used the book as the basis for In the Name of the Father, at which point we say farewell forever to the historical record.

Sheridan says he wanted to make a movie like the Hollywood historical films of the 1930s -- not accurate in detail, you understand, but true to the spirit of the events. On that score, one can only say that the man is as good as his word. Aside from the fact that Gerry Conlon (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) and the other Guildford Four are real people, it's difficult to locate a a single historical fact in the movie. The British press has called the film "a farrago of rubbish."

The wicked Inspector Dixon, who falsifies evidence against the Guildford Four, is fictitious. The wicked IRA operative Joe McAndrew also is fictitious. Conlon's solicitor Gareth Pierce (played by Emma Thompson) is 90 percent fictitious, and the rousing speech she delivers at the Old Bailey is a complete invention. (Solicitors do not plead at the bar in Britain. Such people are called "barristers.")

Conlon's alibi -- that he was robbing a prostitute's flat the night of the bombing -- is less than perfect. In real life, he didn't rob the prostitute's flat until 10 days later In the movie, Conlon and his father share the same prison cell, but in real life not only did they not share the same prison cell, they were rarely in prison.

But the key to the Guildford Four's movie appeal is that the prosecution withheld evidence from the defense. In fact, it did no such thing. The prosecution communicated all evidence to the defense exactly as it should have. Need I go on?

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story," say Hollywood cynics. But the people who made In the Name of the Father aren't cynics. Indeed, they present themselves as highly moral. But this much lying is unusual on the part of people who excoriate other people for lying.

In the world of Barbra Streisand, a righteous moral tone is all. Hollywood bravely condemns Hitler's death camps 50 years after the fact. And the feeling of righteous condemnation is so intoxicating that Hollywood is proceeding to condemn moral outrages that might never even have happened. Surely, greater love of righteousness hath no man.

Respected Historian Robert Kee complains, however, that Jim Sheridan's film is "in parts a farrago of rubbish." He notes, for example, that in the film the missing alibi which prosecutors suppressed was .that of a homeless man Conlon met on a park bench, while in reality the alibi came from an assistant manager of a fruit and vegetable shop who saw Conlon on the night of the bombing. The dramatic license, according to Kee, was motivated by the filmmaker's desire for an outdoor scene, and presumably because a conversation with a homeless man is more dramatic than the testimony of a vegetable peddler. Even more serious distortions of the legal drama ultimately undermine, Kee argues, the credibility of a film which is about the suppression of truth. Kee was one of the first to expose publicly the injustices inflicted on the Guildford Four, and has lambasted the film for telling 'so many lies that it makes its central proposition about a miscarriage of justice questionable,' and of doing 'the work of those who may wish to prevent any more of the truth emerging'. Criticisms of the inaccuracies have also been raised by several of the Maguire Seven themselves.

The film also seemed to use dramatic license when it came to the somewhat distorted police interrogations, and the actual events which took place which are also the subject of dispute. The Court of Appeal even stated "that they believed many of Mr Hill's allegations of ill-treatment were untrue".

Although this didn't stop the film showing the police as little more than torturers. Perhaps this is hardly surprising given that it was later revealed that the films Co-Writer Terry George had served a jail sentence after being arrested in a car with an Irish National Liberation Army member in 1975.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n8_v111/ai_14900054

The Mcguire Seven

The evidence against the Mcguire Seven was based on a thin layer chromatography tests, carried out at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, which seemed to show that they had handled nitroglycerine. In fact Scientists at the 1976 trial said that they had been 'kneading' nitroglycerine.

An RARDE scientist told the May Inquiry (an inquiry in to the case) of the excitement. 'Never before had we seen so many positives on a plate at a reasonably high level of intensity. We just did not believe it . . .'

The evidence given to the Court of Appeal by the May Inquiry, led to four separate areas of doubt relating to the forensic explosive evidence.

First the thin layer chromatography test could also produce a positive result for another substance PETN, which was not then used by the IRA as an explosive (it is used in Semtex, which was then used by terrorists from the Middle East). The prosecution said that the test was unique for nitroglycerine, and that it could be distinguished from PETN by its rate of colour development. When the May inquiry examined the scientists' notebooks in 1990, it found that RARDE was very interested in PETN and that it knew 'throughout the trial that PETN was potentially confusable' with nitroglycerine.

The original trial was also told that second tests on samples from the Maguires was neither practicable or necessary. In fact follow-up tests were carried out to detect nitrotoluenes, which are typical explosives. They were all negative. The RARDE scientists failed to mention these tests at the original trial. The May report adds: 'Even then, when they first gave evidence to me, they did not tell me of the second tests.' Although as the test was deemed neither practicable or necessary, they may have also been deemed not Court worthy. Also the test for nitrotoluenes does not make the intial chromatography test any less valid.

Tests carried out for the May inquiry proved that the Maguires could have been innocently contaminated if, for example, they wiped their hands on a previously contaminated towel. This theory depended on the towel originally having been used by someone who had been handling explosives. No towel from the Maguire household was ever tested at the time.

After the inquiry's interim report, the Maguire case was sent to the appeal court. The appeal court overturned the convictions, but only on the third ground, leaving the possibility that someone who visited the household had been handling explosives.

As the May inquiry progressed it emerged that some test kits produced by RARDE for police to take samples from suspects had ether contaminated with explosives. Of course the difficulty in avoiding contamination must be considerable: RARDE not only makes test kits and carries out forensic tests on explosives, it also makes explosives on the same sites. Nevertheless a strict system of controls, using ether from the same batch in a blank comparison test, should have shown up the contamination. Whether these contaminated test kits were used on the Maguires is unknown.


This was not some conspiracy, the problem lay in the fact that traces of explosives were found on the hands (and rubber gloves) of many of the accused (the Mcguires). This is what Forensic Experts concluded at the time. It's questionable if any of the Mcguires or the Guildford Four would have been sent to prison without this forensic evidence showing bomb making activity in the Mcguire household (the Mcguires being relatives of the Conlons). The validity of the tests is now in hindsight questionable, but at the time police and officials did not have reason to question the work of the leading explosive experts from RARDE. This is the real evidence that led to the miscarriages of justice, this evidence was utterly damming at the time. It also should be noted that when the Court of Appeal dismissed the cases, it did so on the premise that somebody visiting the house may have used explosives rather than the Mcguires, which is hardly the ringing endorsement of absoloute innocence the film potrays.

It also should be noted that there was no Inspector Dixon, this charachter was ficticious, as were the conversations between Conlons solicitor and the ficticious Inspector Dixon or Government Officials and Inspector Dixon. There was no records officer off sick, and there was no tramp or park bench (ficticious and made up for the film), and the prostitute robbery recounted in the film occurred ten days after the Guildford Bombs, so was not a useful alibi, as the film seemed to imply.

During the trial of the Balcombe Street gang in February 1977 the four IRA men instructed their lawyers to "draw attention to the fact that four totally innocent people were serving sentences for three bombings in Woolwich and Guildford". They were never charged with these offences. However, no evidence has ever been presented that proves the involvement of the four men, they never actually admitted any personal responsibility, and the IRA never identified the true perpetrators of the attack. It should be noted that it was the IRA who originally implicated the four, and that the IRA would have killed Hill if they had had managed to get to him whilst he was in Southampton (he had stolen weapoms from them and was believed to be an informant). Also the forensic explosive evidence suggested that the convictions were safe, and that the Balcombe Street Gang could be trying to free fellow terrorists, believed to be an active IRA service Unit. However if the Balcombe Street gang had admitted to the bombings and provided some evidence to back up their assertions, then the Guildford Four and Mcguires would have undoubtedly been released (despite the damming forensic evidence) but they didn't at the time and have never done so. Apart from some vague statement the Balcombe Street Gang had given to their lawyers there was little else to base an appeal upon at the time, and certainly no new evidence.

Finally the Court of Appeal (Criminal) is seperate from Government and the legislative. The Court consists of an Independent Group of Judges and legal experts that looked at the evidence according to the Law and from a purely independent judicial viewpoint. These cases mainly collapsed due to the possibility of cross contamination of forensics rather than any dramatic events.

http://www.criminal-information-agency.com/article.php?article=59

Whilst I have every sympathy for Conlon (and his father Gusieppe) and the other innocent people imprisoned. I have just as much, if not even more sympathy for the families of the 40 people killed and the hundreds who were badly injured in the bombings at the time. The city centre pub bombing in Birmingham, Guildford and Woolwich and those left dying on the side (including children) of the road after the M62 Coach bombing.

Furthermore I have every sympathy for the family of Brian Shaw, a soldier who left the army and married a girl from Belfast. Shaw was kidnapped by the IRA, tortured, tried by an IRA Court and then executed. Malcolm Shaw (a Church Minister) and brother of Brian Shaw remains convinced that Paul Hill played a central role in his brothers murder. As Brian Shaws widow Maureen Hall said of Hill's release - "We have to live with this decision, but we do not have to agree with it".

I didnt say ITNOTF showed the IRA in a good light, please re read the post.

I DID say can you name a film which shows them as the 'enemy' or in a bad light. ITNOTF showed the IRA man who came into the prison later as a 'cool calm professional killer' a masturbatory scene for the 'faithfull'.

Yes he was shown setting a prison officer on fire - but did you notice they made a point of 'justifying ' it by being careful to show that officer as a 'bad chap' beforehand.

Depictions of the IRA are always careful not to show the IRA doing anything bad.

In Patriot Games, the 'IRA' gang which is murdering people in America, is carefully pointed out to be a 'breakaway group'.

Still waiting for that example of a film showing the battle against the IRA and terrorism from the other side.....???

[deleted]

I've been living in the North all my life and one thing is quite clear, Rice_1 is clearly a sectarian anti-Catholic bigot. He uses his language very carefully here because he knows that if he says what he wants to say he'd get banned from this site in an instance. It's actually people like you Rice_1 that's holding the Peace Process back, this film is about the failures of the British Judicial system and you're turning this into a thread about the IRA/SAS and Robert Nairac? Go peddle your Loyalist crap elsewhere.