Hillsborough families attack ‘ludicrous’ acquittals of police

Bereaved Hillsborough disaster families have condemned the “ludicrous” decision to acquit two former South Yorkshire police officers and the force’s former solicitor on charges of perverting the course of justice, bringing to a close their 32-year fight for justice.

Peter Metcalf, 72, a former solicitor for the force, and the then Ch Supt Donald Denton, 83, and DCI Alan Foster, 74, had been accused of changing 68 officers’ statements to withhold important evidence and criticisms of the police operation, and “mask the failings” of the force.

However, the judge at the trial at Salford’s Lowry theatre, Mr Justice William Davis, ruled there was no legal case to answer because the altered police statements were prepared for Lord Justice Taylor’s public inquiry into the disaster.

That was not a statutory public inquiry, at which evidence is given on oath, but an “administrative exercise”, Davis told the jury, so it was not a “course of public justice” that could be perverted.

Speaking outside court on Wednesday, Deanna Matthews, the niece of victim Brian Matthews, said the situation was “ludicrous” and the law was “not fit for purpose” and needed to change.

Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son, James, was killed in the disaster and who was the last chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, said the outcome was a disgrace.

“It’s the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up,” she said. “Our loved ones went to a football match and were killed, then they and the survivors were branded hooligans, and we’ve been put through a 32-year legal nightmare looking for the truth and accountability. Now they’re saying the police were allowed to change statements and cover up at Taylor. The legal system in this country really has to change.”

The crush on the Leppings Lane terrace of Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough football ground at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989 killed 96 men, women and children.

Families fought a 21-year campaign against the first 1991 inquest verdict of accidental death, which followed the South Yorkshire police campaign to avoid responsibility for the disaster and allege that Liverpool supporters’ misbehaviour was to blame.

That inquest was finally quashed in 2012. In 2016, the jury at new inquests determined that the 96 victims were unlawfully killed due to gross negligence by the police officer in command, Ch Supt David Duckenfield. The jury also rejected the police allegations, determining that no behaviour of Liverpool supporters contributed to the disaster.

In a court hearing on 21 May, Metcalf’s barrister, Jonathan Goldberg QC, had argued that Metcalf was entitled to remove whole “topics” of relevant evidence from police statements if he had thought it necessary, because there was no legal duty to tell the whole truth to the Taylor inquiry.

Dismissing the charges, Davis ruled: “The Taylor inquiry was not the course of public justice. Whatever the effect of [Metcalf’s] acts in relation to that process and whatever element of culpability there may have been on his part, it could not constitute the criminal offence with which he is charged.”

From the public gallery of the theatre, Christine Burke, whose father Henry, 47, was one of the 96 unlawfully killed, called to Davis that nobody had been held responsible, and families’ lives had been “destroyed”. With the judge and teams of lawyers in the courtroom, Burke cried: “It’s so wrong; the law has to change.”

After the jury were instructed to find Metcalf, Denton and Foster not guilty, Burke called out: “Members of the jury, the families are heartbroken.”

The trial’s collapse will lead to searching questions for the Crown Prosecution Service, whose decision-makers were urged by families’ lawyers to charge a wider conspiracy by South Yorkshire police, not focus narrowly on changed statements. Of six men charged with offences in 2017, Duckenfield was acquitted of manslaughter in 2019, Sir Norman Bettison had charges dropped in 2018, and Metcalf, Denton and Foster have now been acquitted. The only conviction has been against Graham Mackrell, then secretary of Sheffield Wednesday, who was found guilty of a single safety offence, and fined £6,500.

Many families have been scathing about the CPS’s conduct of the prosecutions and were disillusioned after Duckenfield’s acquittal. Few regularly attended the trial in Salford, or at St George’s Hall in Liverpool where it was being broadcast live.

Sue Hemming, the CPS director of legal services, said the outcome of the trial “will have been surprising to many”. In a statement she said: “That a publicly funded authority can lawfully withhold information from a public inquiry charged with finding out why 96 people died at a football match, in order to ensure that it never happened again – or that a solicitor can advise such a withholding, without sanction of any sort, may be a matter which should be subject to scrutiny.”

Source: (The Guardian)