The Thin Green Line by Richard Doherty

Author:Richard Doherty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781781594469
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-01-08T08:00:00+00:00

However, Amnesty International had taken an interest in the allegations of ill treatment of suspects and produced a report in May 1977 outlining seventy-eight such cases. Secretary of State Roy Mason asked for details which Amnesty refused to provide. Most complaints centred on Castlereagh interrogation centre. Newman asked Mason to establish an independent inquiry to review ‘present practices and procedures in relation to the interrogation of suspected terrorists’. The inquiry was chaired by Judge Harry Bennett QC and included John Marshall, Professor of Clinical Neurology at the University of London, and retired Home Office Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir James Haughton.

The subsequent Bennett Report concluded that a small number of officers had used force to extract statements from terrorists and recommended a number of changes to interrogation procedures, including closed-circuit television to monitor proceedings, a code of conduct for interviewing officers, more supervision by uniformed and senior officers and access to a lawyer after forty-eight hours, as well as medical examinations after each individual interview. Bennett had identified a number of cases where the injuries to suspects had been ‘inflicted by someone other than the prisoner himself’. This was only a fifth of the Amnesty total and, if anything, proved that many prisoners were harming themselves in order to bring police officers into disrepute.

The Bennett recommendations angered many detectives who predicted that the previous one-in-ten conviction rate would not be sustained if these were put into place, but within months thirty-five of the recommendations were in place. In July 1980 one IRA man, Edward Brophy, was acquitted on forty-eight of forty-nine charges, which included the La Mon murders, because the judge refused to admit statements made in Castlereagh in September 1978; Brophy was sentenced to five years for IRA membership. He was later released on appeal when the conviction was quashed.

In an ideal world police officers should not harm anyone in their custody. However, in that same ideal world, no one should be murdering police officers or committing outrages against the community in which they live. The frustrations of detectives involved in the interrogation of terrorist suspects can only be imagined; quite often they knew that those before them had been involved in the most horrendous crimes, including the murders of police officers, but had no proof that could be used in court unless the suspect were to provide a confession. That some officers resorted to ‘thumping a prisoner around the ear’ might be understandable and prove that the officers were only human; but that so few officers did so was a sign of the RUC’s high degree of rofessionalism.

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