Kevin — Danny Morrison — My Report on Lord Hutton
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My Report on Lord Hutton
The judge’s ruling was no surprise. For decades
in Northern Ireland he was a guardian angel of
the establishment
Danny Morrison
Tuesday February 3, 2004
The Guardian
Lord Hutton and I were once very close. I sat
about 10 feet from him in the witness box while
he quizzed me on charges of conspiracy to
murder, IRA membership and kidnapping. He
eventually sentenced me to eight years in jail
on the testimony of a police informer I had
never met. Although in the Belfast high court
Hutton occasionally acquitted republicans and
dismissed the appeals of soldiers, nationalists
generally considered him a hanging judge and the
guardian angel of soldiers and police officers.
I was amused at the response of sections of the
media and British public to last week’s report
when he exonerated the prime minister, his
defence secretary and his press officer from the
BBC’s allegations that the government “sexed up”
a pre-war dossier on Iraqi WMD – and damned the
BBC. Incredibly, many who followed the Hutton
inquiry and observed the contradictions, the
lies and the evasiveness of government
representatives, expected this damning evidence
to be taken into account.
Do they know anything about how the
establishment works? Have they never heard of
Ireland’s six counties and how our poor,
conscience-stricken judiciary coped with all the
quandaries they faced?
At stake in Britain were the office of the prime
minister (as distinct from Blair) and the
judgment, integrity and morale of the British
military authorities, now deep in a quagmire in Iraq.
Lord Denning, master of the rolls, the
third-highest law lord in Britain, sat on the
privy council with ministers of the government.
To him the rights of Irish people, in
particular, were subservient to the fabric of
the British policing and judicial system.
Denning summed this up best in his 1980 judgment
when he ruled against an appeal by the
Birmingham Six, whose case was that they had
been beaten and made false confessions. He said:
“If the six men win, it will mean that the
police were guilty of perjury; that they were
guilty of violence and threats … That was such
an appalling vista that every sensible person
would say, ‘It cannot be right that these
actions should go any further’.” There is an old
caution that one shouldn’t confuse lawyers with
the clients they defend. However, judges almost
certainly can be judged from their judgments.
Hutton first made the news in 1973 when,
representing the Ministry of Defence at the
inquests into those killed on Bloody Sunday, he
castigated the coroner, Major Hubert O’Neill.
O’Neill had suggested that the Paras had no
justification for shooting the people. Hutton
told him: “It is not for you or the jury to
express such wide-ranging views, particularly
when a most eminent judge has spent 20 days
hearing evidence and come to a very different
conclusion.”
Those 20 days were a reference to the
seven-week-long inquiry by Lord Chief Justice
Widgery into the 13 deaths in Derry that
resulted in a historic miscarriage of justice,
currently being re-examined by Lord Saville.
Thirty years later, when it came to the inquiry
into the death of one former weapons inspector,
Hutton would take seven months to absolve once
again those who opened fire (in Iraq) without justification.
In 1978, he was part of the team defending
Britain at the Strasbourg court against Irish
government allegations that internees in 1971
were tortured. In 1981, he presided at the trial
of a British soldier who ploughed at high speed
into a group of people in Derry, killing two
youths. Hutton advised the jury “to consider
whether you think that perhaps unconsciously
some of the witnesses … had a tendency
somewhat to strengthen their evidence against
the army”. He suggested that the driving, while
reckless, might not have been unreasonable given
the rioting and attempts to apprehend the
rioters. The soldier was acquitted.
He agreed with supergrass trials, and in 1984
sentenced 10 men to some of the longest
sentences ever imposed, a total of 1001 years,
on the word of a paid informer, Robert Quigley,
who was granted immunity from prosecution.
In 1986, he acquitted an RUC reservist, Nigel
Hegarty, who was charged with unlawfully killing
John Downes at a rally. When the RUC opened fire
with plastic bullets on civilians at a sit-down
protest, Downes picked up a small stick and was
running towards two officers when Hegarty killed
him from about three yards. Despite Hegarty
offering no evidence, Hutton speculated that he
had acted “probably almost instinctively” and
that, given “the stress of the moment and the
obvious determination of the deceased”,
Hegarty’s response was not unreasonable.
In the trial of two Royal Marines charged with
murdering Fergal Caraher in a shooting incident
at Cullyhanna in 1990, he said he could not rely
on the accounts given by the civilian witnesses
for the prosecution or on those given by the
accused and a fellow soldier, so he acquitted
the soldiers even though he believed they might
have been lying.
And he was involved in the Brian Nelson affair.
Just a week before Nelson’s trial, which almost
certainly would have exposed British collusion
with loyalist death squads, Hutton and the trial
judge, Basil Kelly, met the then prime minister,
John Major. Nelson was offered a deal to plead
guilty to sample charges, which he did. He
served just a few years.
In an episode of the BBC’s Yes, Prime Minister,
the PM, Jim Hacker, is furious when someone
leaks to the press that he has manipulated his
solicitor general to suppress a political
memoir, not on security grounds but because it
contained a chapter about him, The Two Faces of
Jim Hacker. He wants the culprit found and
convicted. His cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey
Appleby, rushes to set up a leak inquiry. Hacker
stops him and suggests they lean on the judge to
guarantee success.
The wise Sir Humphrey suggests that it is better
to find a judge that doesn’t need to be leaned on.
Danny Morrison is a former publicity director
for Sinn Fein and author of All the Dead Voices:
A Memoir
danny@dannymorrison.com
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