THE Sunday Times, which is being sued for libel by Mr Gerard Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, yesterday appealed in the Supreme Court against a refusal to allow it access to copies of the forced statements Mr Conlon made to Surrey police in 1974.
The court reserved its judgment. Times Newspapers Ltd, London, appealed a decision of the High Court in July last year when the judge said he could not see how the original statements were relevant to the defence pleadings.
The newspaper was seeking access to copies of the original forced confessions Mr Conlon made in 1974 which led to his wrongful imprisonment for 15 years for the Guildford pub bombings.
Times Newspapers sought the information in relation to its defence of the libel action.
The article in which the alleged defamation occurred was in the Sunday Times on February 13th, 1994, written by the then film critic who was reviewing the film In the Name of the Father.
Mr Conlon is taking the libel action over two statements in the review concerning his father, Mr Guiseppe Conlon.
Yesterday, Mr Donal O'Donnell SC, for Times Newspapers, said it was accepted a statement that Mr Conlon implicated his father in his forced confessions was untrue. The newspaper denied the words could be defamatory and was pleading justification.
There was also a plea of fair comment.
The newspaper sought information about the forced statements made by Mr Conlon in 1974 and whether the texts of the statements in the May Report, a result of an inquiry into the convictions, were true and accurate transcriptions of the two originals.
Police officers to whom the statements signed by Mr Conlon were made were not prepared to make themselves available as witnesses.
Mr O'Donnell said that in the course of his forced confession Mr Conlon was caused to implicate Mr Paul Hill, Mr Patrick Armstrong, Ms Carole Richardson and Ms Anne Maguire.
It was accepted that those forced confessions implicated innocent persons.
After Mr Conlon's conviction was quashed in Britain, he wrote a book Proved Innocent which led to the film In the Name of the Father.
Mr Adrian Hardiman SC, for Mr Conlon, said these matters were completely irrelevant to the case.
The forced statements were absolutely false and were extracted by torture which led to Mr Conlon's incarceration.
How could a series of statements which, it had been admitted, were obtained by force and extracted by torture be relevant? he asked.
A statement extracted in that way from a person was in no sense that person's act.
Only matters that were directly at issue were relevant. Nothing a person did under torture was capable of defaming anyone.
The statements the newspaper wanted were rejected by the English Court of Appeal as a text in 1989.