Guildford Four

it clearly revealed the browbeating methods of coercion used upon an exhausted boy, and helped many people make up their minds about the police and their subtle brutality.

In the 1980s the main obstacle to preventing and correcting miscarriages of justice involving confession evidence was that people found it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a serious crime of which they were innocent (Gudjonsson, 2003a). That misguided attitude changed considerably after the acquittal of the ‘Guildford Four’ in October 1989 (Ewing & McCann, 2006; Gudjonsson & MacKeith, 2003),