1989: The Confession That Was Buried for 12 Years: the Guildford Four Finally Freed
The Guildford Four were four young people wrongly convicted over a pub bombing campaign carried out by the IRA in Guildford, England, in 1974, and sentenced to life in prison after detectives extracted confessions during lengthy, uncharged interrogations. Three of the convicted were in their early twenties; the youngest was still a teenager.
Within a few years an IRA unit known as the Balcombe Street Gang admitted in custody that they, not the four, had carried out the attack, but the confession was dismissed and the convictions stood. It took more than a decade, and the discovery that police had secretly rewritten interview notes to match the statements used at trial, before the case collapsed. On 19 October 1989, after 15 years behind bars, the Guildford Four walked free.
