| In 1978 my son, along with three other
men, was charged with a horrendous crime - the murder of newspaper boy
Carl Bridgewater. I watched in complete shock and disbelief - how could
this have happened to my son and myself? As the court proceedings gathered
pace, false confessions were produced and dubious witnesses perjured themselves.
The police were more than anxious to bring a conviction and, as we know
today, they falsified documents to secure a conviction.
When the guilty verdict was pronounced,
I vowed that I would clear the names of my son, Michael, Jim Robinson,
Pat Molloy and Vincent Hickey. I knew that a gross miscarriage of justice
had been perpetrated and that justice would prevail. What I was not prepared
for was the time that it would take and the opposition that I would encounter
along the way.
I did not know where to start and to whom
I could turn. In those early days I felt very much alone, but as my campaign
got under way, people began to take notice. However, the police and judiciary
will never easily admit that they are wrong and it took almost twenty years
before they were finally forced to concede that a miscarriage of justice
had taken place. I have made a great many friends over these years and
I am indebted to them all. So many of them would have liked to have contributed
their experience to the production of this booklet but, for reasons of
space, this was not possible. Our hope is that it will serve as a useful
guide to both innocent prisoners and their families in their fight for
justice. If such a booklet had been available to me in those early days,
I really believe that my campaign would have been shorter.
Unfortunately, the judiciary still does
not appear to have learned from its past mistakes. At the time of writing
no police officers have been brought to justice for the part they played
in the Bridgewater Four miscarriage of justice or any other, and there
are still corrupt police around who will do anything to further their own
ends. It is, therefore, sadly inevitable that there will be further miscarriages
of justice. The important lesson to learn is that every effort must be
made from the very start to demolish the evidence of the prosecution. Once
a conviction has been made, it is very difficult to reverse - the law does
not like to be proved wrong and, as I have learned, it takes many years
of full-time work to prove a miscarriage of justice has taken place.
In solidarity, Ann Whelan, January 1999 |