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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-03-23 Daily Xml
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BIRMINGHAM SIX

The Hon. A. BRESSINGTON (15:41): Today I use this opportunity to bring to this parliament's awareness that last Monday was the 20th anniversary of the release of the Birmingham Six, who were wrongfully convicted for the Birmingham pub bombings in 1975. Their convictions were a result of fundamentally flawed forensic evidence, judicial bias and confessions extracted following torture, mock executions and savage beatings by police who knew the men to be innocent. So commenced a 16-year ordeal in which thousands of letters were sent to journalists, members of parliament and anyone else who would listen.

The men had to face the torment of living behind bars as despised murderers while fighting to clear their names. As they have told since their release, they found the legal system to seemingly be more concerned with the preservation of the status quo than truth and justice. Lord Denning, then one of Britain's most senior judges, said that if they were allowed leave to appeal and that showed that police and expert witnesses had given false evidence, it would be an appalling vista. As it turned out, that is precisely what happened.

In their final appeal many years later, it was found that the police and forensic witnesses had deceived the courts, and on 14 March 1991 Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker walked from the central criminal court in England, commonly known as the Old Bailey, free men.

The public outcry at the injustice that had been committed and the resulting loss of confidence in the English justice system compelled the then government to act, and a royal commission on criminal justice was established. Also known as the Runciman Royal Commission, it subsequently recommended the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent statutory body to review alleged wrongful convictions and, where necessary, to refer them back to the Court of Appeal, which has since led to 314 convictions being quashed by the court of criminal appeal, a figure that steadily rises.

While no legal system is infallible, the United Kingdom, in establishing the CCRC, can at least claim that it has learnt from the mistakes in the past and that some good has come from the horror inflicted on the Birmingham Six. The innocent may still be convicted, but at least in the United Kingdom they no longer have to rely upon journalists to investigate their claims, the goodwill of principled lawyers and academics, and ultimately the discretion of a politician as to whether they should be able to access the courts for an appeal.

Those wrongfully convicted in Australia are not so fortunate. As I detailed in my speech when introducing the CCRC Bill 2010, our legal system fails to adequately deal with the wrongful convictions that the appellate courts miss, leaving many victims of miscarriages of justice to languish in prison, and by failing to establish a CCRC we literally turn our backs on them and fail in our responsibilities to the people of this state.

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