Don,
It was over your post on the miscarriage of justice I was disagreeing with you and did not intend to ascribe any of the other comments to which I reacted to you. I am sorry if I upset you through appearing to do so.

While it is true it was the police who set the ball rolling by beating confessions out of these six men and without the confessions Lord Denning said there would not have been sufficient evidence to charge them, much less find them guilty. This manufactured evidence does not, as you put it leave the possibility that they may be innocent, it created the suggestion they might be guilty in the first place. Without it there is nothing.

However the judiciary are supposed to protect us from over zealous policemen and for years let these men rot in the face of overwhelming evidence that they had nothing to do with the bombings, because to do otherwise was to challenge the probity of the whole legal and penal sytstem. The prison officers at Winson Green and the police officers who inflicted such visible damage on these men may have wrongly thought they were callous butchers who deserved what they got but Lord Denning did not. He knew them to be innocent but judged it easier to let innocent Paddies rot in jail than challenge the establishment that put them there. And but for the persistence of a handful of decent people on the outside he would have been correct.

If you don't remember the details read the link Richard Bridge put in. I remember the photographs from the time of the appeal. I remember Denning's statement when he turned them down before. We do know these are innocent men, not in some legalistic technical way but as much as we can know anything. We know who the guilty men are, the police know and have known from soon after the events who the guilty men are.

I suspect you would not like it said about you that you have been beating your lovely wife and while you are legally innocent, because you have not been convicted, no one can be sure you do not do so. I don't think you should be making that kind of statement about other people.