Hillsboro...duckenfield Admits That His Action Were The Direct Cause Of The 96 Deaths

[mikey4444]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31928476

What a pity that it has taken 25 years to get at the truth.

[Peter Pedant]

// Now we've got someone to blame, perhaps we can all move on.//

No ludwig it is not as tho people have said over the last 25 y - 98 are dead and we have no idea why. and then 17 Mar 2015, Dukinfeld whom we previously thought was completely innocent -had now said it is his fault.

It is much more on the lines that the bereaved families were saying: for twenty five years we have heard our dead relatives cursed and abused by people we think should have looked after their safety.

[ cursed and abused in this case is that runours than drunken fans were urinating on the bodies of their relatives were untrue and actively spread by the police ]

It is some place to move on from

[Retrochic]

In a parallel universe he could be facing questions on why he didn't open the gates and prevent the death of 96 people OUTSIDE the ground. I personally don't think his actions were negligent and I think he has been made a scapegoat for the lack of Police training in crowd control. The out of control crowd outside the ground should take most of the blame for this,if they had dispersed instead of surging forward to try and get in, none of this would have happened. Frankly -and this will rile a lot of people I'm sure -I'm sick of hearing about Hillsborough. It was a horrible disastrous thing that should have been put down to a tragic accident,with a serious of unfortunate incidents leading up to it, rather than a witch hunt. I can only assume Compensation plays a big part in this and if it does then that in itself is a tragedy.

[EDDIE51]

I don't think he had much choice over opening the gate, as said the alternative was to have people crushed outside the ground. The mistake was not to have closed the tunnel to the pitch first which I am sure was down to inexperience and lack of knowledge of the layout of the ground. I can not see him as 'directly responsible' in the sense that he intentionally performed an action that caused the deaths. It was 'misadventure' in my opinion.

[ludwig]

There are two distinct things about this - the tragic event itself and then the lies and coverups afterwards. I'm talking about the day itself.

The actual event was a terrible accident. Decisions were made on the day that turned out to have tragic consequences, but were basically someone trying to do the right thing in the heat of the moment and getting it wrong.
To isolate an individual as being 'directly responsible' for all the deaths seems to be just satisfying some kind of mob instinct to have a bogeyman that we can metaphorically lynch for the crime.

As I recall from the news, the judge did a pretty good job of railroading Duckenfield into admitting he caused the whole thing, with a series of leading questions, something like....(I'm going from memory here)..
'You gave the order to open the gate'...'yes sir'
'If the gate been opened the fans wouldn't have got in'...'yes sir'
'If the fans hadn't got in there wouldn't have been a crush'...'yes sir'
'If there hadn't been a crush 96 people wouldn't have died'....'yes sir'
'Therefore you are directly responsible for the deaths of 96 people'..(thinks about this one for a while as it dawns on him he's been stitched up).........'yes sir'.

In actual fact there were many contributing factors, not least the fact that we used to cage fans behind bars like animals at the time. It would be just as valid to say the cages were directly responsible for the 96 deaths.

[ludwig]

Now regarding the lies and coverups afterwards, that's a whole different thing. Anyone complicit in those events needs to be identified and punished severely - but not for killing people, for being despicable lying scumbags who perverted the course of justice and caused incredible pain and suffering to the relatives of the victims.