Forever Lost, Forever Gone

By Paddy Joe Hill and Gerard Hunt

Bloomsbury, London, 1995, 288 pages, hardcover

Review by Hans Sherrer

On June 9, 1975, six accused Irish Republican Army members went on trial in Lancester, England for two November 21, 1974 Birmingham pub bombings that killed 21 people and injured more than 160. Each man was charged with 21 counts of murder. After the biggest trial of its kind in British history, the jury arrived at its verdicts on August 15th. Twenty-one times each, guilty was pronounced against:

John Walker
Gerry Hunter
Hugh Callaghan
Richard McIlkenny
William (Billy) Power
Patrick (Paddy) Joseph (Joe) Hill

Each man was sentenced after the verdicts to mandatory terms of life in prison, and taken away to spend the rest of their natural life in the custody of His Majesty’s Prison Service.

However there was a problem with the men’s convictions: None of the men were members of the IRA, and they were all innocent of having anything to do with the bombings. Forever Lost, Forever Gone is Paddy Joe Hill’s first-person account of how the six men – who became known world-wide as the Birmingham Six - were wrongly accused and convicted of the crimes, and their 16 year odyssey to clear their names.

Paddy and his five co-defendants were ready-made to tie to the bombings because they knew each other, they were all Irish, they were all from Northern Ireland, and they were all living in Birmingham. However no witnesses placed any of the men at the scene of the bombings or established a link between them and the IRA, and searches of their homes, vehicles and belongings didn’t produce any bomb making material or any evidence indicating they had been involved in the bombings or that they were associated with the IRA. So the primary “evidence” against the Birmingham Six was:

1. Five of the men were arrested on the evening of the bombing, November 21, 1974, boarding a ferry for Belfast.

2. Four of the men confessed.

3. Two of the men tested positive for traces of nitroglycerin on at least one hand.

The evidentiary value of those three circumstances is undermined by the following explanations:

1. On November 14, 1974, James McDade was killed when a bomb prematurely exploded that he was planting at a telephone exchange in Coventry, England. McDade was from Belfast and the six men were at least passingly acquainted with him. The IRA was a secret society, and McDade's membership only became public knowledge after his death. The five men were going to Belfast on the Friday evening of the Birmingham bombings to visit family members and friends – Paddy Joe Hill was going to visit his ailing Aunt Mary – and out of respect for McDade’s family they had agreed to attend his funeral that week-end.

Consequently, there was nothing sinister about the men going to Belfast. It was pure coincidence they happened to be traveling on the night of the Birmingham bombing. If there had been no bombings on the night of November 21st, the behavior of the six men would have been identical.

The photo below is of the men’s beaten faces after three days in custody. (142)

2. All of the men were brutally assaulted by police interrogators and threatened with such things as being thrown out of a window or beaten to death if they didn’t confess. Police mug shots taken two and three days after the men where taken into custody show their faces with welts, bruises and black eyes. Paddy Hill writes, “I was kicked and punched all around the room. They kept telling me that I would make a statement or they would kick me to death. They said they would take me to court and say I had admitted being part of the IRA ... I would get done anyway. And they said that even if I got off, they would tell the IRA that I had been squealing, and so the IRA would shoot me.” (81) Yet in spite of being beaten and threatened with death by either the police or the IRA, Paddy was one of the two men who didn’t sign a confession. William Power literally picked the name of his friend Hugh Callaghan out of thin air when his interrogators demanded the name of the “sixth man” involved in the bombings. (73) Callaghan was the only one of the six not arrested traveling to Belfast – but he too confessed after police arrested him in Birmingham and subjected him to third-degree interrogation techniques.

Since the men weren’t involved in the bombings, it would be expected that their confessions would be short on details. Paddy writes:

“The so-called confessions are remarkable documents. They are all incredibly brief, and the actual planting of the bombs is skipped over in each case in just a few sentences. There is no mention anywhere in any of the confessions about who made the bombs, where they were made, or of how and where the bombs were primed. There are numerous contradictions in regard to the number of bombs involved and who did the planning in each of the pubs. ...”

All of the ‘confessions’ refer to the bombs being in white plastic bags. Yet the forensic scientists who sifted through the wreckage of the pubs would later tell the trial that the bombs had been placed inside the pubs, and had been in a small suitcase or briefcase. How odd that four men who had been kept apart should make confessions that talked only of white plastic bags, without a briefcase or suitcase in sight. Of course, another bomb had been found in Birmingham that night ... It had indeed been in a plastic bag. We didn’t know that. But the police did.” (85-6)

Consequently, the ‘confessions’ were not an expression of culpability, but were the police’s bogus reward for using age-old ‘third-degree’ interrogation methods that are known to produce unreliable information – and a false confession.

3. On the night of November 21, 1974 Dr. Frank Skuse administered the Griess field test to a swab of each man’s hands to detect the possible trace presence of nitroglycerin. Paddy’s right and left hand, and Billy Power’s right hand tested positive. The hands of the other four men tested negative. Two days later Dr. Skuse tested Paddy’s swab with a much more sensitive laboratory test – and he said the results were negative for one hand and positive for the other. Billy tested negative for both hands. However at the men’s trial, Dr. Skuse testified there was no documentation supporting his contention that one of Paddy’s hands tested positive in the laboratory test. Furthermore, Dr. Skuse discounted the laboratory results and testified he was “Ninety-nine per cent certain” the (less precise) Griess field test established that Paddy and Billy had handled nitroglycerin. The following exchange occurred when Paddy’s lawyer questioned Dr. Skuse about the possibility he had erred:

Q. I take it there is a possibility of human error?
A. I would not agree with you there.
Q. Not even the possibility?
A. No. (131)

However contrary to Dr. Skuse's assertion, it is an accepted principle in science that there are no certainties, only probabilities. There are centuries of experience supporting the wisdom of that maxim, and it was reaffirmed in 1980 when the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper printed an article about a scientist’s research in an unrelated case discovered that the Griess test could return a positive result from a person’s exposure to substances other than nitroglycerin – including cigarette smoke. (179-180)

Then in 1985 two scientists commissioned by the U.K.’s World in Action television program found that handling a variety of substances, including playing cards, could trigger a positive Griess test result. (204-5)

More than five years later scientists also found that the presence of minute soap particles on a person’s hand could cause the Griess test to register a positive, and government scientists found that cigarette smoke residue and traces of food preservatives on a hand could also register as a false positive for nitroglycerin. (246)

Those scientific findings long after the Birmingham Six’s trial provided support for the speculation of forensic expert Dr. Hugh Black, who testified for the defense that substances other than nitroglycerin could trigger a positive Griess test result – however he didn’t have any test results to back up his speculation.

Consequently the positive Griess test of Paddy and Billy Powers hands was not indicative of the presence of nitroglycerin – but it could have been the result of them washing their hands, or being exposed to cigarette smoke, or handling playing cards or a cigarette pack, or touching a varnished table in a cafe or bar, or from contact with any number of other substances.

Sixteen Years Of Effort Needed To Undo The Prosecution’s Illusory Case

Even though the evidentiary prong’s critical to the prosecution’s case against the Birmingham Six were well-crafted illusions, they were palpable because as Paddy put it - “We were the six most hated men in Britain.” (105) That ensured that Paddy and his five-co-defendants would experience a rocky road of raised expectations and soul crushing disappointments as they pursued their vindication.

Their convictions were upheld by the Court of Appeal in March 1976, and then in the summer of 1976, 19 guards at Winson Green Prison were criminally tried and acquitted of beating the six men. The men had been remanded to the prison three days after their arrests to await trial, and a doctor (Dr. David Paul) testified in the guards defense that the men had been beaten prior to arriving at the prison. (170-1) That provided belated support for the men’s claim that their “confessions” were physically coerced.

The men had their first glimmer of hope in the fall of 1976, when The Birmingham Framework was published. The booklet by two Irish priests – Father Faul and Father Murray – laid out the case for the frame-up of the Birmingham Six based on the information known at that time. However it wasn’t distributed widely enough to have any impact. (172)

About a year later, in November 1977, the six men filed a civil suit against the Lancashire and West Midlands police and the Home Office (the U.S. equivalent of the U.S. Attorney’s Office) for the injuries inflicted on them while in police custody. The suit was based on the police photos of the men’s battered bodies and Dr. Paul’s testimony during the prison guard's criminal trial that the injuries had occurred in police custody. The Home Office admitted liability, but the police fought the suit and filed a motion for its dismissal. (173-4) A year later, in November 1978, Paddy and his co-defendants received the first genuinely positive legal news since their arrest: A judge ruled their civil case against the police could go forward. The police appealed, and in January 1980 Lord Denning reversed the trial court ruling.

Then later in 1980 the first glimmer that the prosecution’s case might be scientifically suspect came to light. The Guardian, one of England’s major newspapers, published an article about a scientist’s report in an unrelated case that the Griess test could register a positive result after a person’s contact with a substance other than nitroglycerin. One of those substances was cigarette smoke. (179-80) On the evening of November 21, 1974, Paddy had been in the ferries lounge smoking and being exposed to cigarette smoke immediately before he was taken into custody. The scientist’s report led to the adding of a supplement to The Birmingham Framework. (180)

However a blow for the men came in late 1981 when England’s House of Lords upheld Lord Demming's dismissal of the civil suit against the police. So more than six years after their convictions, all civil and legal proceedings available to the Birmingham Six had ended unless they could discover compelling new evidence undermining the prosecution’s case. Around that time, Paddy writes that after being transferred to the Albany Prison an assistant governor (warden) told him:

“ ‘I know you are innocent, but when the s*** hits the fan I don’t want to be anywhere near your case.’ he said. ‘It says on your file you are to die in prison. So if you don’t prove your innocence, you will never be released. I’ll do all I can to help you here and I wish you luck. But I can’t do any more than that, and this conversation never took place.’

It was the first time it had really sunk in that I could actually be in prison until the day I died.” (184)

Although Paddy only writes of his disheartenment in the wake of repeated disappointments, one can imagine that his five co-defendants were in a similar state of mind. His desperation was so great that he stagged a 41-day hunger strike at Albany in late 1981 to try and draw attention to the plight of the Birmingham Six. However the other five didn’t join him and the press ignored his protest as his weight dropped from more than 155 pounds to less than 110 pounds. (186)

Paddy may have hit his low point when he received divorce papers from his wife Pat in October 1982. However shortly after that he was reinvigorated by what in retrospect was the turning point for Paddy and his co-defendants. Another prisoner told Paddy that Gareth Peirce was “the best lawyer in the country,” and figuring he had nothing to lose, he wrote her. She responded that she wanted to visit him and discuss his case. So in late 1982 Paddy met with Peirce. He writes:

“... she said she would be willing to work for me. It was not a spectacular moment. I had known from the first few minutes with her that this was a woman who relished the challenge of fighting injustice, that she would not just walk away. But there was something else I had to make clear.

‘I hope you realise that it’s not just me,’ I said. ‘If you take me on, you’re really acting for all six of us. We all stand or fall together.’

She understood that. And of course, the fact that as I had no sort of appeal pending, there was no way of obtaining legal aid to pay for her services. She would be working for nothing. After a few words of encouragement to continue with my letter writing she was gone. I was taken back to my wing by the screws, and as I walked along I felt like skipping with joy. This, I thought, is a woman who is going to get things done.

Back in my cell I launched, with renewed vigour, into a phenomenal letters campaign. I wrote to everybody I could think of who might be able to help in any way.” (196)

Several months later, Sir John Farr, the Leicestershire MP (rough equivalent in the U.S. of a member of the federal House of Representatives) responded to Paddy’s letter. In March 1983 he visited Paddy and went away with a stack of papers about the case that he said he would read. (198) Several months later Sir John returned to see Paddy. He told Paddy that a scientific expert who reviewed the forensic evidence against the men said it wasn’t “worth the paper it was written on.” (200) Sir John was a respected member of England’s political establishment, so his expression of support for Paddy and his co-defendants was another critical juncture in their quest for exoneration.

Then in 1985 the U.K.’s World in Action television program did an in depth investigation into the Birmingham Six’s case. The program’s producers commissioned two scientists to use the Griess test to analyze a person’s hands after it had contact with a variety of substances. The scientists contacted Dr. Skuse to ensure they followed the identical protocol that he used when he tested the Birmingham Six. Those scientists discovered that touching a variety of substances, including a varnished surface, and a coated cigarette pack or postcard could cause a person’s hand to test positive for “nitroglycerin.” (204-5) Paddy had told the police the night of his arrest – and the night the Griess test was conducted on his hands - that he had played cards for several hours on the train to Heysham, the departure point for the Belfast ferry. Paddy described what was shown on national television when the program aired in the U.K. on October 28, 1985, “Then came the most dramatic moment of all. One of the World in Action team, Ian McBride, shuffled a pack of cards for five minutes and then had his hands swabbed and Griess-tested. The result was positive. ... ‘We’ve got the bastards,’ I cried, ‘At last, we’ve got them.’ ” (205) Although it was denied that it was in reaction to the program, Dr. Skuse took early retirement at age 50 from his government job three days after the program was broadcast. Also after the program, Sir John presented the new evidence of the Birmingham Six’s innocence to the Home Office and demanded that their case be reopened. The Home Office declined to do so.

Chris Mullin's Error in Judgement: The Truth About the Birmingham Bombings was published in July 1986. The book not only provided a comprehensive explanation of the evidence then known undermining the conviction of Paddy and his co defendants, but it included the statement by one of the IRA men responsible for the Birmingham bombings that he had not heard of any of the six men before the press publicized their arrest. Three months later the Birmingham Post – the primary paper in the city where the bombings had occurred – published its first article that raised the possibility the six men had been wrongly convicted. That same month a policeman – Tom Clarke - present on the night of the men’s arrest confirmed to Chris Mullin that the men were beaten as he described in his book. (208-9)

Then two months later, in December 1986, World in Action aired a follow up program that included all the new information that had been learned about the case in the previous year – including an on air interview with Tom Clarke. A month later, the Home Secretary told the House of Commons that the Birmingham Six’s case would be referred to the Court of Appeal for reconsideration.

That new hearing began in November 2, 1987 presided over by Lord Chief Justice Lane, who was well-known for his pro-prosecution bias. After a 32-day hearing, the longest appeal hearing in British history, the 3-judge panel announced its decision: “We have no doubt that these convictions are both safe and satisfactory. The appeals are dismissed.” (224) The Court had neither been swayed by the evidence that the confessions were falsely given in response to physical beatings, nor that the Griess test was too unreliable to have evidentiary value. Paddy writes that after the decision was announced Lord Denning, who seven years earlier had ruled against the Birmingham Six in their civil case, said during a television interview, that “he would rather ignore possible miscarriages of justice than do anything that might undermine the criminal justice system.” (226) To Lord Denning and his like-minded colleagues in the English judiciary, “the reputations of the police and courts were more important than the question of whether somebody was innocent or not.” (226)

In October 1989 Paddy was with Gerry Conlon when Gerry was told to pack-up because he was being transferred for an unexpected hearing. (Gerry was one of the Guildford Four who were wrongly convicted of a 1974 pub bombing in Guildford, England. See, What In the Name of the Father Teaches About False Confessions, by Hans Sherrer, Justice:Denied, Vol. 2, Issue 4) Paddy writes, “I helped him pack his things. I gave him a hug and told him, ‘Be lucky, Gerry.’ Then he was gone.” (236) The Guildford Four’s convictions were quashed on October 19th. Paddy describes that he saw on television that night what Gerry did in his first moments of freedom after 15 years of wrongful imprisonment, “He stormed up to a microphone and told angrily how he had spent fifteen years in prison for something he hadn’t done, and how he’d watched his father die in prison for something that he hadn’t done. Then he shouted: ‘He’s innocent, the Maguires are innocent, the Birmingham Six are innocent. Let’s hope they’re next.’” (236)

The world-wide support that began to build on behalf of the Birmingham Six included the picketing of British embassies around the world, and the Soviet government under Gorbachev invited representatives of the men to attend a human rights meeting in Moscow. (237) When U.S. Congressman Joe Kennedy announced in 1990 that he wanted to visit the six men, their custody level was suddenly downgraded from Category A (dangerous threats) – which generally limited their visitors to immediate family members or their lawyers – in order to avoid an international incident between the U.S. and Britain. (239) That custody classification change enabled them to be visited by a wide variety of people.

Then in the summer of 1990 the World in Action television program obtained what had eluded the Birmingham Six for 15 years – proof that the prosecution had concealed exculpatory evidence (in the U.S. that is known as a Brady violation). The program obtained the police report of an interview with a Birmingham IRA member in which he named the people involved in the bombings – including the men who planted the bombs – and none of the six men were named. Thus the prosecution knew prior to the men’s trial that they were innocent.

In August 1990 the Home Office Secretary caved into the increasing public recognition that the Birmingham Six were innocent victims of an orchestrated prosecution frame-up. He referred the case back to the Court of Appeals for reconsideration, citing the face saving reason that there were “apparent discrepancies in the record of an interview with one of the six men.” (241) Apparently privy to what was going on behind the scenes, when the prison governor (warden) told Paddy that he was to be moved for the hearing, he said, “You won’t be coming back this time Hill.” (241)

The appeals court hearing began on March 4, 1991. The men’s lawyer presented the new evidence undermining the reliability of the Griess test to detect the presence of nitroglycerin on a person’s hand that included the discovery by scientists in February 1991 that the presence of soap residue on a person’s hand(s) could cause a false positive for nitroglycerin. (246) The Court was also told that the prosecution had concealed that two traveling salesmen traveling from Ireland had been administered the Griess test at the Heysham dock on November 21, 1974, and that they had tested positive. Furthermore, a government scientist who testified at the 1987 hearing told the Court that those judges had misconstrued her testimony. She testified that a positive Griess test result didn’t establish that a person had handled nitroglycerin – and that government scientists had discovered that the hand of a smoker or that of a person who had handled an item containing food preservatives could test positive. (247) The essence of the defense and prosecution testimony about the Griess test was to invalidate its evidentiary value in pinpointing the presence of nitroglycerin, since anyone exposed to cigarette smoke, or who had eaten a packaged food product (Hostess Twinkies, cookies, licorice, etc.), or touched a varnished surface, or handled a coated cigarette pack or postcard, or touched any number of other items, or simply washed their hands, could register a false positive for the presence of nitroglycerin.

It was also disclosed to the three appeals court judges that a process called ESDA (Electrostatic Document Analysis) was used by defense retained scientists to analyze entries in police notebooks allegedly written in the first few days after the men’s arrest. They found that entries were written out of sync, and some of the entries had actually been written in 1975, months after the men’s arrest and interrogation. The defense’s discovery that the police notebooks had been fabricated and doctored was the “apparent discrepancies” the Home Office was referring to when it asked the Court of Appeals in August 1990 to reconsider the case.

In somewhat dramatic fashion, on the afternoon of March 14, 1991 Lord Justice Lloyd stopped the prosecutor in mid-sentence, asked him to sit down, and told the courtroom, “We have heard enough.” Paddy writes that he then addressed the six defendants, “‘In the light of fresh evidence which has become available since the last hearing in this court, your appeal will be allowed and you will be free to go as soon as the usual formalities have been discharged.’ and that was it. The nightmare that had lasted 16 years, 3 months and 23 days was finally over. The place went crazy. I was stunned at first, trying to take it in, telling myself. We’ve done it, at last we’ve done it.” (250)

A microphone was set-up outside the Courthouse, and Paddy spoke to the crowd, “For 16 and a half years we have been used as political scapegoats. The police told us from the start they knew we hadn't done it. They didn't care who had done it.” (Birmingham Six freed after 16 years, BBC News, March 14, 1991)

The photo below is the six men outside the courthouse after their release.
Left to right: Billy Power, Richard McIlkenny, John Walker, Gary Hunter, Paddy Joe Hill and Hugh Callaghan

Thirteen days after their release, the appeals court announced the reasons for its decision. The judge’s absolved both the trial judge and the appeals court judges who upheld the men’s conviction in 1987 of any blame for their decisions, reasoning that they didn’t have the information available to have reasonably acted differently. Furthermore, the judge’s decision ignored the failure of the prosecution to disclose exculpatory evidence. They however did base their decision on the new evidence that the Griess test was unreliable to have detected the presence of Nitroglycerin, and that there was new evidence that some of the police evidence was unreliable. Paddy writes that after walking out of the courtroom he realized that, “Despite everything that had happened to us, not one policeman, not one prosecution lawyer, not one judge, had turned to the Birmingham Six and said: ‘We’re sorry.’” (261)

After The Release of the Birmingham Six

The final legal proceeding related to the Birmingham Six was two years later in October 1993. Three policemen were put on trial for perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice related to fabrication of their interview with Richard McIlkenny. The judge stopped the trial and dismissed the charges after three days, based on his decision that there was too much prejudicial publicity about the injustices committed against the Birmingham Six’s for the men to receive a fair trial. (278) Thus 19 years after the frame-up of the Birmingham Six began, their case ended without a single policeman, prosecutor, expert witness or judge being held reprimanded, much less convicted of a crime or held civilly liable. Insofar as the British legal establishment was concerned, the men’s conviction and 16-1/2 years of imprisonment was a regrettable but unavoidable incident.

Paddy unflinchingly writes of the difficulties he had adjusting to life outside of prison, and he didn’t let go of his anger at the legal system that unfairly targeted him and his five co-defendants for a crime that there are reasons to believe the police and prosecutors knew before their trial they had nothing to do with. In 1995 Paddy was one of the founders of Miscarriages of Justice Organisation – Scotland (MOJO Scotland) that is dedicated to exposing cases of wrongful conviction in England. In the last part of his book, Paddy suggests that to help avoid miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six experienced, an independent forensic laboratory should be established whose services are available to both the defense and prosecutors. The availability of such a laboratory to the Birmingham Six’s lawyers would have exposed prior to their trial that the Griess test was unreliable to isolate the presence of nitroglycerin.

Since Forever Lost, Forever Gone was published in 1995, it does not include all the details of the years-long tussle that Paddy had with the Home Office over compensation for his wrongful imprisonment. Their dispute was not only over the amount he was to receive, but that the government charged him interest on an advance he was given after his release against his final award,

Forever Lost, Forever Gone made two striking impressions on me. The first is that if it weren’t for Paddy, it is possible his five co-defendants would have died in prison. He apparently had a spunk and the personality to fight their convictions to a degree that they didn’t have. That isn’t meant as a criticism of those men, but it emphasizes that most of the people who are wrongly convicted are more likely to be like Paddy’s five co-defendants than him, and thus they are unable to muster the incredible array of legal, media and political supporters that were necessary for the Birmingham Six to be exonerated. The second impression is that that array of supporters had to sustain their efforts for many years before the British judiciary was literally backed into a corner where it would have been an international embarrassment for the British government if the Birmingham Six’s convictions weren’t quashed: Gareth Peirce, one of the countries leading defense lawyer worked pro bono for nine years; a British national television program aired an investigative program six years before their release that exposed the unreliability of the Griess test – and subsequently broadcast two programs that further uncovered flaws in the prosecution’s case; a Minister of Parliament began campaigning on their behalf eight years before their release, and on and on. Without the staying power of If key supporters it is likely that irrespective of their innocence the Birmingham Six would still be in prison today – where they would have remained until the day they died.

Paddy finishes Forever Lost, Forever Gone with two brief paragraphs that are as apropos to the wrongly convicted in the U.S. as in Britain, or Australia or Canada or anywhere else in the world:

Don’t be sorry for me. Be angry.
Because everything that happened to me was done in your name. (288)

Postcript

On February 9, 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair officially apologized to the 11 wrongly convicted people known as the Guildford Four (wrongly convicted of a 1974 IRA pub bombing and wrongly imprisoned for 15 years) and the Maguire Seven (wrongly convicted of running an IRA bomb factory in London and wrongly imprisoned for up to ten years). Paddy Joe Hill issued a statement on behalf of MOJO-Scotland:

Though this a welcome development after so many years and I Paddy Hill, thank him for it.

However what I want to know is when are we the Birmingham Six going to receive an apology, as well as Judith Ward, Tottenham Three, Bridgewater Four, Cardiff Three, M25 Three, Cardiff Newsagent Three, John Kamara , Patrick Nicholl, Tommy Campbell, Robert Brown, Eddie Browning, Rob Alsobrook, Stephen Downing, Terry Pinfold, Reg Dudley, Bob Maynard and the many more victims of miscarriages of justices that have walked out the appeal court over the past fifteen years. It would probably take Tony Blair the best part of a week to speak out all the names of those who have been exonerated.

Also In light of this apology, and other comments made by the Prime Minister in relation to the horrors and trauma inflicted on innocent people who have been wrongfully imprisoned, and in view of the fact that the British establishment are well aware of the damage that is inflicted on people who are incarcerated over a long period of time.

Hence there own breakdown of pre-release programmes over a period of approximate three years to re-educate and rehabilitate these people before their release back into society.

Why then is there still no counselling programmes to help innocent victims either before or more crucially after their release.

An apology is welcomed but specialized retreats to help counsel and prepare people like myself after their release is far more crucial.

Yours sincerely
Paddy Joe Hill
for the Birmingham 6 and all others