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June 19, 2023 33 mins

The thing about torture is that it works, at least if your only goal is to find a scapegoat.

Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin take us to Birmingham, England. In 1972, two pubs were bombed, and six innocent Irish men were tortured into giving false confessions. The Birmingham Six were freed in 1991, but the crime’s never been solved. To this day, the public demands to know who really planted those bombs.

This update shares the March 2022 court decision protecting one of the key tenants of journalism – anonymity. 

To learn more and get involved, visit: https://www.centeronwrongfulconvictions.org/

Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey guys, Laura here.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Most of the stories we bring you focus on the
American criminal justice system, but this one takes place in
the UK. The case revolves around in IRA bombing in
nineteen seventy two and six innocent irishmen who were tortured
into falsely confessing to the crime. One of the people
working to prove their innocence was a reporter named Chris Mullen.

(00:28):
Through his reporting, he found the people he says were
the actual IRA members responsible for the bombing, but he
refused to give up their names to the police and
the matter went to court in March twenty twenty two.
The court decided that Mullen did not have to name
his source, and even though we want to know who
actually committed these crimes, this ruling protects one of the

(00:50):
key tenets of journalism. It was only with the promise
of anonymity that Mullen was able to get the evidence
against the people he says really committed this crime. Keeping
those protections in place will help journalists to expose present
and future wrongful convictions. Welcome to wrongful conviction, False confessions.

(01:16):
I'm Laura, and I writer, and I'm Steve Drisen Steve.
When we went on our speaking tour last year for
Making a Murderer, one of my favorite places we visited
was Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, it was one of the highlights of our travels.
It was almost like coming home, coming to a place
which understood the work I've been doing for most of
my professional life.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, there was something about false confessions that really resonated
with that audience.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
It's a lived experience and it goes back to the
way in which the Birmingham Six were treated by law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Well, okay, so here's the thing, right. The Birmingham Six
was a case that arose from the fact that two
pubs in Birmingham were bombed. It was one of the
biggest mass murders to happen on British soil after World
War Two. I mean, this is like the Oklahoma City
bombing here in the United States. And the blame for
this crime was placed on these six Irish guys who
were living in England but who had deep roots in Belfast.

(02:17):
The injustice of what happened to these guys is like
almost nothing I've seen before.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, a profound experience of police abuses and of torture
in the interrogation rooms.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Their story resonates for so many people in Northern Ireland
because the whole place has this incredible history of conflict
and struggle against power. I actually think that history is
what brought so many people out last year to our talk.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
I'd like to believe they came to see you and me,
but they were probably there to hear about injustice and
how to fight it. And that's a little bit better
of a reason. I think our story today begins in Birmingham, England.

(03:07):
It's the second largest city in the United Kingdom, with
a population in the millions, mostly English, but also hundreds
of thousands of Irish. Like any big city, Birmingham's got
a thriving social scene. In particular, on almost every corner
there's a pub. It's in two of those pubs that
our story really begins, two ordinary places where people go

(03:28):
after work to get a pint of beer. On November
twenty first, nineteen seventy four, two Birmingham pubs became together
the scene of Britain's deadliest mass murder in modern history.
It all started at eight eleven in the evening, an
anonymous man with an Irish accent placed a phone call
to the Birmingham Post newspaper. There's a bomb planted in

(03:52):
the Rotunda, he said, and there's a bomb in New Street. This,
he added, is double X. Then silence he'd hung up.
The Rotunda was a high rise office building in downtown
Birmingham with a pub on its first floor called the
Mulberry Bush. New Street. Around the corner was where the
city tax office was. There was a pub on that

(04:14):
building's first floor too, called the Tavern in the Town.
And then only six minutes after that anonymous phone call,
it happened two huge explosions. The first was at the
Mulberry Bush at eight seventeen pm. A homemade bomb had
been left in a leather bag somewhere near the back door.
When the bomb exploded, the pub was packed with people

(04:37):
and the damage was horrific. The ceiling collapsed, fire engulfed
the place. People were crushed and burned to death. Others
were impaled by falling beams. First responders arrived and began
working desperately to rescue survivors. At the same time, police
were frantically trying to evacuate the Tavern in the town,
but they couldn't clear it fast enough. At eight twenty

(04:59):
seven pm, a second homemade bomb exploded there again, the
packed pub was destroyed. That explosion was so powerful that
people were blown through the brick walls between the two pubs.
Twenty one people died and one hundred and eighty two
were injured. It was a coordinated attack that left Britain reeling.

(05:22):
So why would anyone bomb pubs in Birmingham? The answer
is politics and history. Here's our friend, doctor Hannah Quirk.
She's a professor at King's College, London who studies wrongful
convictions and like a lot of folks in the United Kingdom,
in Ireland, she had a front row seat to that history.
When she's talking to people who are new to this

(05:43):
part of the world, Hannah likes to start here.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
So there's obviously the famous U two song about Bloody Sunday.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
That song's more than a pop anthem. It tells the
story of the long running and sometimes violent conflict between
Ireland and Britain. And here's that story in a nutshell.

Speaker 4 (05:59):
There's a little implicated history in Ireland, hundreds of years
of history, but in nineteen twenty two there'd been a
civil war and the majority of Ireland was given independence
from Great Britain and formed the Irish Free State, but
a deal was done to say that the six counties
of Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Not everyone was happy with this deal, though. People became
intensely divided about whether Northern Ireland should be part of
the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland, and
those divisions often fell along religious lines.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Most Catholics were nationalists or Republicans. They wanted to be
a United Ireland so the island of Ireland would be
one country, and most Protestants were Unionists or Loyalists. They
wanted to remain part of Great Britain and be governed
from London.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Tensions simmered for years, and eventually anti Catholic sentiment started boiling,
especially in Northern Ireland.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
Catholics were very discriminated against. They had for fewer job
of unities. The housing was worse, so they were very overcrowded.
They couldn't sit on juries for the most part because
they didn't own property. Schools were divided on religious lines
as well, so the civil rights movement grew in the
United States and the Catholic population in Northern Ireland gradually
began to protest about discrimination that they were facing. Two

(07:18):
British troops had already gone into Northern Ireland to try
and keep the peace, and then Bloody Sunday in nineteen
seventy two British paratroopers opened fire on the protesters and
killed thirteen people and injured fifteen of them.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
After Bloody Sunday, the violence really escalated on both sides.
People who wanted to end British rule in Northern Ireland
armed themselves and became active in a group called the
Irish Republican Army or the IRA.

Speaker 4 (07:43):
That song people always said it was the best recruitment
thing the IRA could ever have had. Bloody Sunday I
think was a real tipping point. It got so much attention,
not only in Northern Ireland but in England as well.
These images of the army shooting unarmed protesters.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
The IRA they thought of themselves as freedom fighters and
they used violence to make their point, even planting homemade
bombs all across Britain. The IRA targeted everything from government
tax offices to restaurants and pubs. By nineteen seventy four,
two years after Bloody Sunday. Britain was experiencing an average
of one attack every three days, and British authorities were

(08:22):
regularly retaliating. The conflict was pretty close to a war,
and it became known as the Troubles.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
I mean we called it the Troubles. When I was
growing up, that was all I heard on the news
was the Troubles. And then the first time I went
to Belfast, I realized no, actually this was this was
like a war. They were appalling levels of casualties in
those days as well, before the internet, you'd get newsflashes
on the television, so the screen would go black and
they'd say we interrupt this program, and it would be

(08:49):
a bomb had gone off, or you know, some kind
of serious situation had taken place. For years, there's been
no trush comes on public transport in London, just to
stop people being able to hide bomb. I was probably
about eight or nine and my mom had taken me
and all my cousins and my little brother to buy
school uniforms and there was this announcement over the tannoy

(09:11):
please evacuate the store, and the alarms going off. We
just thought it was a brilliant adventure. Because we were
a bit too little to realize it could be quite dangerous,
and my poor mum was just trying to grab about
eight children and get us out of the store, but
it was all glass of front, so she didn't know
which way to take us and which was more dangerous.
So we just always laughed about how we all had
nail marks in our arms from where she was digging

(09:32):
her fingers in and dragging us out by the hair.
And it seemed like a bit of an adventure at
the time, but that kind of stuff was quite normal.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Here's just how normal these bombings had become. The IRA
had rules, and under its rules, IRA members who bombed
a civilian target had to call British police and warned
them thirty minutes before the bomb went off. The idea
was to give enough time for police to evacuate as
many people as possible without sacrificing the bombs p litical point.

(10:01):
But the British police needed a way to make sure
these anonymous phone calls were authentic not hoaxes. So the
IRA and the police agreed on a codeword known only
to them. If the caller used the codeword, you could
be sure the bomb threat was real, and that codeword
was double X. On the day the bombs went off,
tensions between the IRA and the British were sky high.

(10:24):
A week before, an IRA member named James McDade was
killed in Britain when a bomb he was placing went
off prematurely. IRA sympathizers in Britain were planning a hero's
funeral with military processions and honor guards, but the British
authorities quickly passed laws and making those plans illegal instead.
On November twenty first, mcdade's body was flown from Birmingham

(10:48):
to Belfast for burial. Only hours after the plane carrying
his body took off, the bombs went off too. Between
the timing of the bombings and the use of the
double X codeword, it didn't take long for the police
and the public to conclude that the IRA was responsible. Now,
it's true the anonymous caller hadn't given the usual thirty

(11:08):
minutes advanced warning, but that fact got ignored as a
wave of anti Irish anger swept over Britain. The IRA
issued a denial, but no one listened. The British public
was terrified and the British authorities were enraged, there was
a thirst for justice and revenge. Within hours of the bombings,

(11:30):
police got a tip five Irish men had been seen
boarding a train that left Birmingham right before the explosion
at the Mulberry Bush. Four of them had tickets continuing
on to Belfast in Northern Ireland. Their names were Jerry Hunter,
Dick Mackilkenny, John Walker, Billy Power and Patti Hill. They
were what the Irish call working class lads who didn't

(11:53):
have a lot of extra money. All five men were Catholic,
all were married, and most of them had kids. None
of them was affiliated with the IRA. They were headed
to Belfast to attend James mcdade's funeral, but more out
of community obligation than for political reasons. For his part,
Patty Hill borrowed his train fare from a nun. He
promised to pay her back by doing some painting work

(12:15):
when he returned, but that debt would soon become the
least of his problems.

Speaker 5 (12:28):
This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company,
and Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, a leading international
law firm. The AIG pro Bono program provides free legal
services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals
most in need, and recently they announced that working to
reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar

(12:51):
of the program's mission. Paul Weiss has long had an
unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to
the most vulnerable memory of our society and in support
of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal
justice area.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
For the first few hours, the train ride was uneventful,
but when the train pulled up to Morecambe's station on
the evening of November twenty first, the police were waiting
a group of irishmen leaving Birmingham just as the bombs
went off, seemed suspicious. All five were arrested and brought
to a nearby police department. That's where a forensic scientist

(13:33):
tested their hands for traces of nitroglycerin, a bomb ingredient.
The hands of two men tested positive, the scientists said,
Billy Power and Patty Hill. That was enough for the police.
Not just justice, but revenge was suddenly possible. Within a day,
police arrested a sixth Irishman, Hugh Callahan, who had been

(13:54):
with the other five before they boarded the train, and
the interrogations endured by these six men, the Birmingham Six,
were horrific. It started at the Morcambe Police Department with
John Walker. A group of police took John into a
back room where he was beaten, kicked, and burned with
a cigarette while other officers held his arms back. The

(14:16):
other men heard John screaming, and then their turns came too.
For hours, they were all bloodied and beaten from head
to toe. One of them, Billy Power, was kicked over
and over on his head, legs, and stomach. He was
dragged by his hair and in one of the most
sadistic moments of this interrogation, police stretched his scrotum.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
During these interrogations, at least some of these guys were
shown a letter, a letter that said that the torture
they were experiencing was state sanctioned. It was a letter
on government letterhead that basically told the police officers, you
can do whatever you need to do in order to
get a confession from these men. To these guys, message

(15:00):
was this pain, this torture is going to continue unless
you confess.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
By twelve fifty five pm the next day, November twenty second,
Billy had had enough he signed a written confession prepared
by police, admitting guilt in the Birmingham pub bombings. A
few hours later, the men were transferred to the custody
of another police unit, the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad,
where the torture continued. Beatings, burnings, stress positions, even mock executions.

(15:32):
Patty Hill remembers having a pistol shoved into his mouth
so brutally that it broke several of his teeth. With
a cold metal barrel in Patty's mouth, his interrogators slowly
counted to three and pulled the trigger three times. They
did this each time Patty expected to die, only to
discover that the chamber didn't contain a bullet. The thing

(15:54):
about torture is that it works, at least if your
only goal is to find a scapegoat. A November twenty third,
Hugh Callahan, Dick mcelkenny, and John Walker signed false confessions.
Like Billy, they claimed that they were IRA members and
that they'd planted both pub bombs. Somehow, Patty Hill and
Jerry Hunter were holdouts. They refused to sign confessions despite

(16:17):
the torture. Police would later claim that Patty and Jerry
verbally confessed, which Patty denies. The four written confessions were
short and virtually detail free. In fact, one of the
only details included was wrong. The confessions claimed that the
bombs were left at the pubs in white plastic bags,
but forensic analysis showed the bags had been leather. It

(16:37):
didn't matter. Four of the Birmingham six had confessed, and
all of them had been beaten within an inch of
their lives. Revenge, it seemed, had been achieved.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
The last thing that you want interrogators to do when
they go into an interrogation room is to be guided
by a sense of vengeance, because what's going to happen
and is the interrogator is going to do everything in
his power to quench that thirst for revenge, and the
interrogation no longer becomes about the truth.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
After the confessions, the six were charged with murder and
transferred to Winston Green Prison, where guards continued the beatings.
When the Birmingham Six were finally brought to court a
week after the bombings, they'd been brutalized from head to foot.
Patty Hill's wife was in the courtroom with their two
year old son. When the little boy saw his dad's injuries.

(17:31):
He was so traumatized that he needed medical attention. But
authorities told the judge they had done nothing wrong. The
men had been attacked, they said, by other inmates.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
We've seen excuses like that over and over again, even
in the United States. When somebody is battered, the police
changed the narrative from the beginning. They either blame it
on somebody falling down the stairs, or they blame it
on other inmates. But when these men appeared in court
for the first time, everybody knew what had happened to them.

(18:02):
It was clear that they had been through an ordeal.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
That ordeal was far from over. Based on the confessions
and the nitroglycerin evidence, the Birmingham Six stood trial on
June ninth, nineteen seventy five. A defense expert testified that
the explosives testing had been faulty, and defense witnesses pointed
out that no explosives had been found at any of
the men's homes, but in short order that Birmingham Six

(18:29):
were convicted. Each man was sentenced to twenty one life sentences,
one for every person who died, and the people of Britain,
all of whom thought it could have been them inside
those pubs. They believed that justice had been done from
behind bars. The Birmingham Six fought their convictions like furies

(18:51):
and insisted the authorities acknowledged they'd been tortured, but for
a while it looked like the entire system was lined
up against them. Eventually, fourteen prison officers were charged with
assaulting the six, but despite plenty of evidence, those officers
were all acquitted at trial. The six also tried to
soothe their torturers, but a judge dismissed their lawsuit in

(19:14):
nineteen eighty and he did it for reasons that you
have to hear to believe. Just think what it would
mean for Britain's legal system. The judge explained, if these
men were allowed to prove they'd been tortured, it would
mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they
were guilty of violence and threats, and that the convictions
were erroneous. That was such an appalling vista. He declared

(19:38):
that every sensible person would say, it cannot be right
that this lawsuit should go any further.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
You know, the appalling vista here is this paternalistic attitude
of this judge that the public can't handle the truth
he's saying that if this torture were allowed to be
seen by them, if this in justice were allowed to
be acknowledged, the entire system would crumble. The irony is
that by suppressing the truth, by putting these allegations in

(20:08):
evidence of torture in the closet, he is breaking the
very system he claims to want to protect. Where are
these men supposed to get justice if not in a
court of law.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
But while the court system closed its eyes to this injustice,
the world didn't. Journalist Chris Mullen, who would go on
to become a member of Parliament, investigated the bombings with
fresh eyes. In nineteen eighty five, he retained two scientists
who debunked the test that supposedly had found nitroglycerin on
Patty and Billy's hands. A police officer also publicly confirmed

(20:46):
that the Birmingham Six had been beaten by their interrogators.
The next year, Chris Mullen published a book about the
case called Error of Judgment. In the book, Mullen described
meeting IRA members who admitted they were involved in the bombings,
although he didn't disclose their names, and Mullen explained something
that had been a mystery for years why the double

(21:09):
X caller hadn't given the full thirty minutes warning before
the first explosion. Turns out the bombers meant to give
police thirty minutes, but the telephone booth they'd planned to
use had been damaged by vandals. By the time they
found another phone, only six minutes were left. The warning
system wasn't as fool proof as they thought. That was

(21:30):
how these bombings became one of the deadliest mass murders
in modern British history. In nineteen eighty seven, advocates, including
renowned civil rights lawyer Gareth Pearce, convinced a court to

(21:54):
re examine the convictions of the Birmingham Six. At the hearing,
police officers testified about why their colleagues torture the six men.
Evidence was also introduced about a handwritten chart that had
been found in the police station. The interrogators apparently used
this chart to line up the facts in the different
men's statements and make sure they matched. Of course, those

(22:16):
facts were actually lies.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
The discovery of this chart basically proved what the men
had been saying all along, that we didn't confess to
these crimes. These were stories that were scripted by the police,
and we were tortured into saying what they wanted us
to say.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
But despite this new evidence, relief was denied and the
case stalled for four years until a second hearing was granted.
There new evidence was introduced that further undermined the nitroglycerin
testing on Patty and Billy's hands. But what finally tipped
the balance, as Gareth Pierce later wrote, it was the
simplest of stupidities. Previously, police had testified that the men

(22:59):
confessed freely and that after they confessed, their stories never changed.
But Pierce had found the notebooks on which the men's
confessions had been written. Sure enough, as the police wrote, edited,
and rewrote the false confessions on notebook pages, their pens
left indentations on the pages. Underneath those indentations revealed how

(23:21):
the stories had evolved and been altered, and how the
police's testimony had been false.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
These indentations were like track changes, you know. They were
imprints on paper that were left because the police officers
were writing and rewriting so furiously that they left a
mark on the paper. Evidence that the confessions were scripted
is evidence of police contamination. That the story didn't come

(23:50):
from the defendants. It came from police officers.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
All six convictions were declared unsafe that's a British term,
and thrown out, and on November twenty first, nineteen ninety one,
the Birmingham Six walked out of prison after sixteen years
behind bars.

Speaker 4 (24:09):
Still makes the hairs on the back of your neck
stands on end, doesn't it. I remember it really vividly,
that image of them walking out of the court onto
the street, and builders hanging off scaffolding from the buildings
across the road, people packed outside, these hundreds and hundreds
of people, TV crews from around the world, and then
that amazing image of them all coming out, linked hands

(24:32):
holding them above their heads, with Chris Mullin, the journalists
who had campaigned for them, and then Paddy grabbing the
microphone and shouting how he'd spent sixteen years in prison
for a crime he didn't commit. It was that really
raw emotion that was just so shocking. The police tore
us from the start that they knew we hadn't done it.

(24:53):
They told us they didn't care who'd done it. They
told us that we were selected and that they were gone.
A frayrom us they came the people in their happy
let's w a tullifies justice. I don't think them people
enough got the intelligence, no, the honors in a spell award,

(25:14):
never mind dispensive.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
The six won their freedom years ago, but even today
real justice still seems illusory. There's never been a formal
declaration of innocence or exoneration. Even the court decision throwing
out their convictions still made veiled references to their possible guilt.
The closest the Birmingham Six has come to justice was
when they won a defamation lawsuit after a member of

(25:40):
Parliament called them guilty. The British government has compensated them financially,
but the amount doesn't come close to repaying them for
days of torture and sixteen lost years.

Speaker 4 (25:51):
A psychiatrist assessed the six when they put in their
claim for compensation, and he said they had post traumatic
stress to sodia that was on the level of somebody
who had been in a war zone. I think what
they'd been through was exceptional given the violence that they'd suffered,
as well as the miscarriage of justice. I mean, they
had been tortured, they'd had to fight and fight all

(26:12):
the time in prison for their own safety and fight
to prove their innocence. If you've had that level of
adrenaline running through your system for sixteen years, that doesn't
just disappear when you walk out of court.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
And as for the bombing, it's never been definitively solved.
In fact, over the past few years, there's been an
ongoing inquest in Birmingham to reinvestigate what happened that day.
For years, Chris Mullen refused to name the men he
said had accepted responsibility, citing his journalistic obligation to protect sources.
Right before the inquest, Mullen finally published an article identifying

(26:48):
two former IRA members who are now dead. For its part,
the IRA has never officially admitted responsibility for the bombings.
At the inquest, one former IRA member and if i'd
only as witness O, named the same perpetrators that Mullin
had named, plus two others. Another witness testified that the
high body count was accidental and described the bombings as

(27:11):
an IRA operation that went badly wrong in some ways,
though the system has tried to learn from its mistakes.

Speaker 4 (27:18):
If you were writing a history of the criminal justice
system in this country, the Birmingham Six is a real
tipping point. It wasn't about the politics of Northern Ireland.
It was about the criminal justice system has done something
terribly wrong. So there was a real sense at the
time that the system was in crisis. People couldn't have
confidence in the system because there were so many wrongful

(27:39):
convictions happening. And on the day the Birmingham Six were
released from prison, the Home Secretary stood up in Parliament
and said, I'm ordering a commission to look into the
criminal justice system.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Based on that commission's recommendation, the UK created the Criminal
Cases Review Commission in nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is independent, but it's funded
by the government to investigate cases likeness and to see
where mischaracters of justice have happened. The CCRC isn't perfect,
but it's a remarkable organization. It's one of the few
places in the world where, to be honest, the government
has been big enough to say things do go wrong

(28:17):
and we need to create a way of putting this
right and every country should have one.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
In addition, the UK has adopted reforms around the way
suspects are interrogated outlying not only physical torture, but also
other tools of coercion, like lying to suspects. These are
reforms that we should be enacting in the United States.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
I always say that the UK is thirty five years
ahead of where we are in the United States. As
far as interrogation reforms, they don't allow any confessions to
be admitted into evidence that are obtained by oppression, and
oppression doesn't mean just physical torture. It also means psychological

(29:00):
torture and the use of tactics which are likely to
render a confession unreliable. All of these reforms are aimed
at getting the truth and not just getting a confession.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
The British legal system wasn't the only one to initiate
meaningful change. Patti Hill used the compensation he got for
his wrongful conviction to start a nonprofit, the Miscarriages of
Justice Organization. Its mission is to help people recently released
from prison to get back on their feet and to
help them handle the pain and anger they'll probably carry
for a long time.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
There's this incredible caring side to Patty. He talks about
when people get out of prison, many of them seek
him out, and at least pre COVID he would welcome
them in his home, and those are the people that
give him the greatest comfort in life because they shared
at least some of the experience that he had when

(29:59):
he was in prison.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
You know, when I went back to Scotland last year,
I went to visit Patti Hill.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
I'm so sad that I missed that opportunity.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
He's an incredible man, but also he is angry still
and committed through that anger to improving the system. All
he wants to do is remember what happened to him
and then use that memory as fuel to change the system.
For Patty, all of those physical wounds have long since healed,

(30:31):
but the emotional wounds and the drive that he has
to make sure this doesn't happen again, those are there forever.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
We see that time and again with people who are exonerated.
They want to tell their story. They want the world
to know what happened to them so it doesn't happen again.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Hello, Hello, Patty, Hello Laura.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
How are you doing? Patty?

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Oh good? So give us a year ago when I
saw you in Glasgow at the Mojo offices. Yeah, when
you work with the families of other people who are
in prison, is there anything to say to them to
give them hope.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
I tell their families they're gonna have good moods. They're
gonna have bad moods, you know, And I tell them move,
You're not on your own. We can mess in the
mood in any way. That's the main thing, you know.
You often hear that, oh cliche, time is a great healer?

Speaker 1 (31:29):
Is it true?

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Believe me, Time does not heal nothing. The only thing
you can hope for is that every day, please God,
you've run down with a little bit better.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Do you have a support system people to help you
on those bad days.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
When I meet up with some of the guys from
the Gem and one of the pubs and well being
be there for five six hours, that's when the barriers
come down.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
You can be yourself, all yourself maybe exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, yeah, good time.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special
thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis.
Our production team is headed by Senior producer and Pope,
along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show
is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern.

(32:33):
Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow
me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I Wrider,
and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and

(32:54):
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
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Hosts And Creators

Lauren Bright Pacheco

Lauren Bright Pacheco

Maggie Freleng

Maggie Freleng

Jason Flom

Jason Flom

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