The Evolution of Forensic Science
39
Sidebar 1
The Birmingham Six — A Miscarriage
of Justice
On November 21, 1974, at 8:15 in the evening, a bomb exploded at the Rotunda pub in Birmingham,
England. Seconds afterward, another bomb exploded at the Tavern. A third bomb, planted at the tax
office, failed to explode. The two live bombs resulted in 21 deaths and 162 injured persons. Minutes
before, the
Birmingham Post and Mail
newspaper had taken a call from
a man with an Irish accent
tipping it off to the placement of bombs in all three locations.
That same evening, five Irishmen traveling from England to a funeral in Belfast were stopped
as they attempted to board a ferry to cross the channel. The five had spent the evening on a train
from London to Heysham. During their journey, they had played cards and smoked cigarettes. Shortly
after midnight, all five had been apprehended and taken to the police station.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Dr. Frank Skuse, a forensic scientist with the Home
Office, showed up at the jail. He swabbed each suspect’s hands with ether and performed a Greiss
test, ostensibly to check for the presence of explosives on the men’s hands. The Greiss reagent turns
pink in the presence
of nitro-containing compounds, including nitrates, a common ingredient in
explosives. However, it is extremely nonspecific and reacts with many different nitro-containing
compounds. According to Dr. Skuse’s records, two of the men showed no reaction at all on either
hand; two others showed positive reactions on one hand. The fifth man’s hands gave a negative result
for the Greiss test, but apparently showed a faint positive for a water-based test to detect the presence
of ammonium ions. Although a control test on Skuse’s own hands showed a similar reaction, he would
later testify that the man could have handled explosives. Dr. Skuse was later to maintain that if a
suspect showed a positive
reaction to the Greiss test, he would be “99 percent certain” that the suspect
had been in contact with nitroglycerine, a common explosive used to make bombs.
According to the men’s accounts they were brutalized by the police throughout the night and
into the next day. One of them reported being coerced into implicating a sixth suspect, leading to his
detention as well. Four of the six eventually signed statements amounting to confessions to the
Birmingham bombings.
Mr. Justice Bridge presided over the criminal trial that took place at Lancaster Crown Court
during June of 1975. Dr. Skuse testified for the prosecution. He presented his original results from
the presumptive Greiss tests performed at the jail, and also the results of confirmatory
tests performed
on the same material at the laboratory. Skuse apparently performed either thin layer chromatography
(TLC) or gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), or both, on the remainder of each sample
that had given a positive Greiss reaction. According to Skuse, only one sample, from one man’s hand,
was confirmed to contain nitroglycerine by one of the more-discriminating tests, and even that
interpretation was challenged by Dr. Hugh Black from Leeds University, an independent expert
working for the defense. Nevertheless, the jury, apparently at the urging of the judge, convicted all
six men, and recommended life sentences.
The
verdict was appealed, at least partly on the grounds that Judge Bridge had overstepped his
judicial function by conveying his views so forcefully to the jury that the opinion of Dr. Black, the
defense witness, was worthless and should be ignored. The appeal was heard on March 30, 1976, and
although the justices lamented that Justice Bridge “unhappily went somewhat far,” they rejected the
notion that the conviction was influenced by the forensic results at all and dismissed the appeal.
In 1978, Mr. John Yallop, a former Home Office forensic scientist who first introduced the
technique of testing hand swabs for explosives residue, wrote to the solicitors acting on behalf of
the six men, now known, somewhat infamously, as the Birmingham Six. Yallop mentioned that he had
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40
Principles and Practice of Criminalistics
poisons in body tissue successfully. However, like ignitable fluid
analysis in a
fire-cause investigation, a toxicological analysis only addresses the
what
and
maybe
how
questions in a case investigation. The most exquisitely performed
drug analysis cannot relate directly to
who
. Interestingly, it is one of the subset
of forensic analyses for which answering the
what
question is an end in itself,
for example, the identification of illegal drugs.
Advances in instrumentation over the last half of the 20th century have
enabled the detection of chemicals with exquisite sensitivity and specificity.
In particular, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and the cou-
pling of a mass spectrometer to a gas chromatograph (GC-MS)
have virtually
transformed the fields of drug analysis, toxicology, arson, and explosives.
Immunological tests using antibodies developed against specific drugs have
also revolutionized toxicological testing. However, probably no invention has
had more impact on the everyday lives of normal citizens than R. F. Borken-
stein’s development, in 1954, of the Breathalyzer for field-sobriety testing
(Saferstein, 1998).
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