27 YEARS LATER, JUSTICE FOR STADIUM VICTIMS
96 DIED IN 1989
Families of 96 soccer fans who died in Britain’s worst sporting disaster declared Tuesday that justice had finally been done as an inquest jury ruled the victims had been unlawfully killed in a tragedy caused by police blunders.
Relatives of the victims chanted “Justice for the 96” and sang the Liverpool club anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, outside a specially built courtroom after the conclusion of two years of fresh inquests.
The families had campaigned for 27 years on behalf of relatives who were crushed to death in overcrowded sections at Hillsborough Stadium in 1989.
The police force responsible for the stadium in the northern English city of Sheffield said “we unequivocally accept the verdict,” while apologizing for their failings to the families.
Those failings included police at the time shifting blame for the disaster from officers to the fans, who they smeared as drunks trying to get into the game without tickets.
The dead, including children, had their blood-alcohol levels taken and pubs were visited by officers gathering statements.
Sir Norman Bettison, a South Yorkshire chief inspector who went on to become chief constable of Merseyside Police, is alleged to have told a student in a pub in May 1989: “We’re going to try and concoct a story that all of the Liverpool fans were drunk and that we were afraid they were going to break down the gates so we decided to open them.” Bettison denied this.
By the end of the year, police plan to conclude a separate criminal investigation into wrongdoing by authorities at the April 1989 FA Cup semifinal match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the stadium, where second-tier English club Sheffield Wednesday still plays.
The Crown Prosecution Service said it will then “formally consider whether any criminal charges should be brought against any individual or corporate body.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron paid tribute to the courage displayed by the victims’ families, tweeting that “long overdue justice” had been provided by the jury.
Families have fought to ensure authorities were held to account after being angered by the verdicts of accidental death at the original inquests. Those verdicts were overturned in 2012 following a far-reaching inquiry into the disaster that examined previously secret documents and exposed the wrongdoing and mistakes by police.
“There’s many a time we’ve been climbing up the mountain. We wanted to stop,” said Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son, James, died at Hillsborough. “It’s the ordinary people. It’s the fans, the survivors. They were the ones chanting for justice at all the games, they are ones giving you that uplift. You’ve got to carry on.”
New hearings held in Warrington, close to Liverpool in northwest England, required a jury for the longest time in British legal history.
Relatives leaped to their feet, cheering and weeping, as the jury gave its answer to the most significant of the 14 questions set by the coroner, reaching the verdict of unlawful killing by a 7-2 majority.
That finding meant the jury was convinced David Duckenfield, the then-South Yorkshire Police chief superintendent in charge of policing the game, was in breach of his duty of care to fans and his actions amounted to “gross negligence.”
Newly promoted and inexperienced at the time, Duckenfield conceded he was “not the best man for the job” and that he “froze” as he tried to handle the crisis.
Duckenfield told the inquests that he told a “terrible lie” by saying fans had rushed through gates at the Leppings Lane turnstiles eight minutes before kickoff rather than admitting to authorizing the opening of the gates. The order allowed more than 2,000 fans to flood into a standing-room section behind a goal with the 54,000-capacity stadium already nearly full.
Inside the stadium, five minutes after kickoff, a surge of people pushed hundreds of spectators against a steel mesh fence that soon collapsed.
IT’S THE FANS, THE SURVIVORS. THEY WERE THE ONES CHANTING FOR JUSTICE AT ALL THE GAMES. — MARGARET ASPINALL, WHOSE SON JAMES DIED AT HILLSBOROUGH