Six are charged but more court dates to come
BARRY DEVONSIDE did not imagine that he would wait 28 years to hear that six individuals, including a match commander, will face criminal charges stemming from the disaster that claimed the life of his 18-year-old son.
This breakthrough did not provide a vast amount of solace for him when it finally came, yesterday.
In unremitting rain, Mr Devonside wanted to discuss his boy Christopher, who would now be 46, rather than the 95 counts of manslaughter which former chief superintendent David Duckenfield is set to answer.
‘We had a son and I don’t want to make stupid comments but he was a perfect son,’ he said of Christopher, one of the 96 killed in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.
Yesterday’s audience with the lawyers was in an unusual place — Warrington’s Parr Hall, where the Rolling Stones played in 1963. But there was only tension when around 100 people drew up the red seats in front of the stage to hear the UK Crown Prosecution Service explain who would be charged.
Prof Phil Scraton is the individual who has perhaps done most to brings the families to this day, with fastidious research which uncovered evidence of the post-Hillsborough statement-tampering process known to South Yorkshire Police as ‘review and alteration.’
It was the CPS who had provided most information, with extraordinarily detailed disclosures about their charging decision.
Their prosecutors will argue in court that Duckenfield displayed ‘a failure to discharge his personal responsibilities’ at Hillsborough which was ‘extraordinarily bad and contributed substantially to each of the deaths’.
Norman Bettison will stand trial on four counts of misconduct in public office for allegedly lying about the extent of his involvement in Hillsborough to further his own career, when applying for the job of Merseyside Chief Constable in October 1998. Permitting a press release to be issued in his name which ‘untruthfully asserted he had never “besmirched” … Liverpool supporters’, the day after an independent review revealed the South Yorkshire force’s catastrophic failings has added to his own charge sheet.
Scraton cautioned that those 28 long years and the high profile of Hillsborough in the last five of them will make the dispensing of justice difficult now, and that a jury unaffected by the public discussion will be hard to find.
‘It’s very difficult to take historic cases when you’ve got fading memories, people who’ve died along the road and massive publicity,’ he said. ‘But it is always possible to have a fair trial. The CPS would not have taken a case unless they thought it was prosecutable.’
Mr Devonside just feels the families had tried to correct wrongs by acting with ‘decency’, though he was not the only one reflecting that the road is not fully travelled and that many more hearings await before he can lay the past to rest.
‘We are ready to do that,’ he said. ‘We are ready but it is very hard to face it.’