Gareth Peirce

Gareth Peirce lawyer who specialises in high-profile miscarriage of justice cases

Gareth Peirce (born 1940) is a British solicitor, educated at the Cheltenham Ladies' College, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE). She is best known for her work and advocacy in high-profile miscarriage of justice cases involving people accused of Irish and Islamist terrorism.

In September 2009, Gareth Peirce wrote an article on the Lockerbie bombing trial, in which she was highly critical of the prosecution evidence and of the forensic scientists (Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes) that led to the wrongful conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, which she described as "the death of justice".

Personal life

Born Jean Webb, she dropped her forename while relatively young, and took the name Gareth. She has been described as a very private person who shuns the limelight and refuses media interviews.

She lives in Kentish Town, North London, with her husband, Mellen Chamberlain "Bill" Peirce (born 1930), a writer and photographer, son of the American painter Waldo Peirce and his third wife, Alzira. Bill and Gareth Peirce have two adult sons, Nicholas and Zachary.

Career

In the 1960s, she worked as a journalist in the United States, following the campaign of Martin Luther King. Married, she returned to Britain in 1970 with her husband and elder son and undertook her postgraduate law degree at the London School of Economics. In 1974, she joined the firm of the radical solicitor Benedict Birnberg as a trainee, being admitted to the Roll of Solicitors on 15 December 1978.

Following Birnberg's retirement in 1999, she continued to work as a senior partner of Birnberg Peirce and Partners. In the mid-1970s, she supported specific campaigns for legal reforms of police procedures that permitted the prosecution and conviction of persons based solely on identification evidence. Individual cases then very much in the news led to the establishment of Justice Against the Identification Laws (JAIL), an organisation that Peirce supports.

During her career she represented Judith Ward, a woman wrongfully convicted in 1974 of several IRA-related bombings, the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg, a man held in extrajudicial detention by the American government. In 2008 Journalist Nadarajah Sethurupan, the founder of Norway News, appointed Peirce as his solicitor. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, appointed Peirce as his solicitor in the extradition case: "Swedish Judicial Authority v Julian Assange".

Recognition and reception

Her role in the defence of the Guildford Four was dramatised in the 1994 film, "In the Name of the Father", with Peirce portrayed by Emma Thompson. Peirce has reportedly never watched the film, and stated in 1995 that she was "an extremely unimportant participant in the story" but was "given a seemingly important status". She was appointed a CBE in 1999 for services to justice, but later wrote to Downing Street asking for it to be withdrawn, accepting responsibility and tendering an apology for any misunderstanding.

Sir Ludovic Kennedy, a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, dedicated a book to Peirce, calling her "the doyenne of British defence lawyers" and that she "refuses to be defeated in any case no matter how unfavourable it looks". Benedict Birnberg, who first employed her as a solicitor, believes she has "transformed the criminal justice scene in this country almost single-handedly".

Michael Gove, a journalist and later a Conservative MP, once described her as being a "passionate, committed and effective supporter of the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance", which he said was committed to destabilising the 'Establishment'. In 2005, Gove told The Sunday Telegraph that as well as serving her clients, she has an "idealism that is motivated by a political agenda".

Peirce was one of the initial eight people inducted in March 2007 into Justice Denied magazine's 'Hall of Honour' for her lifetime achievement in aiding the wrongly convicted.

"The Framing of Megrahi"

On 24 September 2009, the London Review of Books published an essay by Gareth Peirce entitled "The Framing of Megrahi" which she described as "the death of justice"

Publications

"Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice", a collection of her essays for the London Review of Books, was published in 2010. Of her defence of Muslim suspects accused of terrorism, Peirce has said:

We have lost our way in this country. We have entered a new dark age of injustice and it is frightening that we are overwhelmed by it. I know I am representing innocent people; innocent people who know that a jury they face will inevitably be predisposed to find them guilty.

See also

• Lockerbie Official Narrative
• Cameron's Report on Lockerbie Forensic Evidence
• The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103

External links

• Gareth Peirce speech regarding Samar and Jawad
• "This covert experiment in injustice", The Guardian (4 February 2004)
• "Was it like this for the Irish? Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain", London Review of Books (10 April 2008)
• "The Framing of al-Megrahi", London Review of Books (24 September 2009)
• Vanity Fair article on Mouloud Sihali, February 2008, No. 570

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