Error of Judgement – The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings – 30th Anniversary

Wednesday 20th November from 18:30 to 20:30
Hosted by The City Law School and Department of Journalism
City University, Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre, Tait Building, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
Public event, all welcome

On the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings, even now it is still unresolved. Chris Mullin, the investigative journalist and former MP, exposed a notorious miscarriage of justice. Chris will be speaking on the 30th anniversary of the case and why miscarriages of justice are still happening despite changes to the police and judicial system.

Register to attend
https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2024/november/error-of-judgement-the-truth-about-the-birmingham-bombings-30th-anniversary

As the BBC highlighted the case this week –

One night 50 years ago, on 21 November 1974, five men boarded a train from Birmingham New Street station heading for the Lancashire port of Heysham to catch a ferry to Belfast. The train left shortly before 8pm. Around 20 minutes later, a bomb exploded at a pub in Birmingham city centre called The Mulberry Bush. It was followed by a second explosion at The Tavern in the Town, another pub nearby. Twenty-one people were killed and 220 injured. The five men who had left the city by train – and a friend who waved them off at the station – were detained hours later on suspicion of being behind the bombings. They would become known as the Birmingham Six. At a trial in 1975, they were each sentenced to life for the murders of 21 people.

In 1991 their convictions were quashed and the men were released from prison. During the original trial, Chris Mullin had been tipped off that there might be something flawed with the convictions. It took several years to prove the mens’ innocence, but few could have imagined that decades on there would still be so many questions to answer or that now, a full 50 years since the bombings, no one has been brought to justice for what’s believed by many to be the largest unsolved mass murder in modern British history.

In the London Review of Books, Chris Mullin highlights that the appeal hearing lasted six weeks, making it the longest in British history, and said: “What I did was overwhelmingly in the public interest. It led not only to the correction of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history but also to the winding up of the notorious West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, which in turn resulted in the quashing of many other convictions. It led indirectly to the setting up of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has overturned a further five hundred convictions. And, finally, my investigation led to the identification of three of the four perpetrators of the original bombings”.