Anthony McIntyre ☠ The only surprise, if indeed one can be found, in response to the acquittal last Thursday of Dave Cleary, AKA Soldier F - a Parachute Regiment 'cruel, cynical and clinical killer' - would be if someone proved naive enough to express surprise at the verdict.
As anticipated by anyone familiar with legacy and the British justice system, a mass killer walked free, his brass neck not weighed down by the albatross of a conviction for murder. That seems to be a fate exclusively reserved for non-state combatants.
The inability to secure a conviction is the latest in a litany of Public Prosecution Service failures in high profile cases. The body, arguably unfit for purpose, has established a record of pursuing cases it cannot win, like the Soldier F one. At the same time, it fails to pursue cases where the likelihood of conviction is considerably higher, as in those recommended for prosecution by Kenova.
Often the British judiciary is found wanting when it comes to delivering justice in Norther courts. On this occasion there was no service delivery failure at the judicial level but very much a failure on the part of the PPS.
The core of the Prosecution case against Killer Cleary was based on hearsay evidence which if not accepted as credible by the court, would result in the case falling apart. The Prosecution made it clear that hearsay was the core evidence, everything else was peripheral. A case was being carved out of rotten wood. There was never a chance of it making across the line.
While allowing the hearsay to be admitted as evidence, the judge ruled that its evidentiary value was of such poor quality, it fell 'well short' of what was required for a conviction. It never even made the bar of manslaughter let alone murder. Yet the PPS continued with a course of action it had to have known would be futile, bringing nothing of comfort or closure to the loved ones of those butchered by Cleary and his murderous colleagues.
As a result, the man widely regarded as the most prolific of the Bloody Sunday killers has been rewarded with a finding that he did not commit murder. It is a backward step from the findings of the Saville Inquiry.
Colum Eastwood, the Derry MP at Westminster, said of the families:
There isn’t much road left in terms of the judicial process for these families, which is very sad and difficult for them . . . It is absolutely clear that those soldiers, including Soldier F, shot and killed people on Bloody Sunday. After 53 years they have shown the world what actually happened on Bloody Sunday.
But they had already shown that to the world long before the trial of Cleary. Saville, which came about because of their unrelenting campaigning, may have fallen short of the hopes held by the relatives of the slain but nevertheless left the global public in no doubt that the Parachute Regiment was guilty of a murderous atrocity perpetrated on the streets of Derry. The image projected onto the world screen from Derry's Guildhall by a British Prime Minister, using the language 'unjustified and unjustifiable', was one of Britain guilty of a massacre, the victims innocent.
By seeking prosecutions for eminently understandable and ethically justifiable reasons, the Bloody Sunday relatives, if it was a finding of guilt they sought, made an error of judgement. There was no tangible advantage to be gained from taking Cleary to court and every advantage for him in being tried. Up until last week he had no legal cover for his actions. Now he has, even if an ethically threadbare one. The British state and political unionism which governed the North at the time of the massacre, will be able to insinuate that whatever happened on Bloody Sunday it did not amount to murder, and they now have a court finding - which they previously did not - to draw upon.
Having closely followed the Saville Inquiry, the right wing conservative British commentator Douglas Murray writing in 2021 said the Bloody Sunday Paras:
What the acquittal of Soldier F demonstrates is the paucity of prosecutions as a truth retrieval mechanism. A psychopath who mowed down innocent people in a British Army massacre is declared not guilty. That is truth suppression not recovery, which might help explain why some of those whose fingerprints are at many a 'crime scene' are happy for prosecutions to continue, confident that the truth about them will not be unlocked through such a mechanism. It suits their purposes of evading accountability to have in place a beyond reasonable doubt standard of proof rather than a balance of probability one.
include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars . . . if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?
There are enough of them, and they have been buoyed by he comfort blanket of Thursday's very avoidable verdict.
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