Thompson, Patrick

Patrick Thompson received a life sentence with a 30-year minimum term for the murder of four British Army officers in a Northern Ireland landmine attack in the mid-1970s. The explosion, which happened early in the morning of July 17th, 1975, on the road between Dundalk and Newtownhamilton, is often referred to as the “Forkhill landmine attack”.

The CCRC received an application for review of Mr Thompson’s conviction in February 2018.

The CCRC referred Mr Thompson’s case on the grounds that there was a real possibility that the Court of Appeal would find his conviction to be unsafe because the senior officer who led the investigation was not a credible witness.

Mr Thompson appeared before a Trial Judge in March 1976 at the Belfast City Commission. He was charged on four counts of murder and of being a member of a proscribed organisation.

The prosecution relied upon admissions that Mr Thompson was alleged to have made in police custody. Mr Thompson stated that the alleged admissions were the result of ill-treatment by the police.

Around a year after his sentencing in March 1977, Mr Thompson’s appeal against conviction was heard. He repeated that his admissions had been the result of inhuman and degrading treatment by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and as such should have been excluded from his 1976 trial. However, his appeal was unsuccessful.

Mr Thompson applied to the CCRC in February 2018 and after careful consideration, the CCRC found compelling evidence that called into question the credibility of the senior investigating police officer who questioned him at the time of his arrest.

The same police officer was later criticised in the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal’s decision in R v Latimer, Hegan, Bell and Allen [1992] 1 NIJB 89.

This judgment found that the officer was one of a number of RUC police officers who had re-written interview notes and had subsequently given untruthful evidence when called as trial witnesses.

The officer had been present in an interview in which Mr Thompson was alleged to have confessed to the offences, the confession being crucial to the prosecution’s case. The allegations of the appellants in Latimer bore striking similarities to what Mr Thompson alleged happened in his own crucial interview.

In addition, during review it emerged that another officer who had interviewed Mr Thompson in July 1975 had been prosecuted for having assaulted a different suspect in police custody in 1975 and was convicted of that offence, the circumstances of which bore similarities to the serious mistreatment Mr Thompson alleged during his own questioning.

Having considered the Court’s findings in that case, the CCRC considered that the credibility of the lead police officer as “a witness of truth in criminal proceedings” was substantially weakened.  

On that basis there was a real possibility that the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal would conclude that Mr Thompson’s conviction was unsafe. 

The CCRC referred the conviction in March 2022.

The Northern Ireland Court of Appeal quashed the conviction in April 2024.