It was 7-2 in only one of the 14 questions. That's telling too. And it doesn't alter the admiration due to the families for thrir determination.

It tells me that after two years, two whole years of hearing all the evidence day in and day out, not all the jury was convinced they were unlawfully killed.

No you are not wrong. Nobody could have foreseen that on that day those events would have collided to cause tragedy. But these events usually are a perfect storm of a number of unlikely things coming together and causing tragedy.

I think Bradford raised the flag about the risk associated with penning in spectators. Any risk assessor would have that at the top of thier assessment. I think the reason it wasn't had a lt to do with how football was perceived back then by the vast majority.

I agree. It was clearly the 4th criteria that 2 of the jurors didn't believe had been met. I can understand that. The fact that it was a majority verdict does demonstrate that this wasn't as clear cut as some believe. Blatent disregard for the life and safety of others is a very high bar.

Compare it to any kind of industrial fatality where negligence or carelessness is a factor and the outcome will most likely be manslaughter, or unlawful death. This is no different really if the actions of the police contributed needlessly to the chain of events that caused lives to be lost.

Is overdue justice -- justice?

I would just like to think that if it happened to me, I would not be pursuing prosecutions of people who did not deliberately mean any harm to my loved one.
An eye for an eye is not always justice in my world

Justice at last.

I would hope that you would feel the need however to pursue justice for your dead loved one.

Nobody's asking for an eye for an eye either, nobody wants Duckenfield to be crushed to death. What they want is the truth and for justice to be served. If that involves prosecutions then so be it.

If I hit someone with a car accidentally I don't mean them any harm but harm has been caused and it is likely that I will have to answer for causing that harm.

That is correct.
If the Taylor report was written today the conclusions would be exactly the same, and the outcome - all seater stadiums - would be exactly the same.
Taylor would not be suggesting "safe standing" areas to placate individuals who want to stand next to a numbered seat which is bolted in the upright position to create 3% more "atmosphere". We are fortunate that Taylor had much more on his mind than any trivial priorities.

perhaps you wouldn't

but then if your 'loved one' was painted as something that you knew they weren't, and the authorities were lying and then lying some more to cover their arses, you might not have quite the same attitude

1 - It wasn't a trial
2 - So is it fair that 96 innocent lives were lost due to failings on the security of that day, ran by the police?
3 - Is it fair that that red top scum falsified the goings on of the incident to make the fans look like it was their fault?
4 - Is it fair that the families of those 96 have had to wait 25 years for justice?

I could go on but I think the story and all that evidence speaks for itself.

The families may well have thought like you at the time but if you read up on the subject you'll see that what happened afterwards changed the issue altogether.

...but no discussion as to why they were being penned in in the first place. Fences didn't just suddenly appear as if by magic.

But that bitterness has ruined many of their relationships/lives and turned them into people they would never have become.
Who is to say that would not have happened anyway - but to many it became a one-eyed obsession and a lost life of their own
That's the real tragedy for me

It's not just that the police actions may have caused it; there appears to have been a deliberate attempt to not only cover up potential criminal conduct; but an attempt to place the blame on the victims. They collaborated with their mates in the scum press to do this.

And a drunk driver doesn't deliberately mean any harm.

I agree that maybe they weren't expecting what happened to have happened.
But surely if you see the pen was already full then opening a bigger gate to let more people in would be trouble.

Its not just that but its the aftermath that made it worse. People were literally begging authorities for help through those gates and there pleas were ignored. Had they been listened to....96 may have been less. And to have people cover all sorts of errors up to cover their own backsides is unreal. The list of issues in the aftermath is endless so it is understandable the families wanted justice.

All those families wanted was justice, to have their loved ones not painted as mindless thugs, to have authorities admit they lied, lied and lied some more

Pathetic comment.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you try and fill something that is already full with no relief, something will eventually give. Even the police, often not the sharpest tools in the box, ought to have known this.

The jurors listened to 2 years of evidence, a lot of which has not been made public.

So frankly your opinion is completely worthless.

Yes, we should just let those people responsible for the deaths of 96 people continue their lives shouldn't we?

What reasons have you got for beleiving that?

From the David Conn article in The Guardian. This was a tragedy just waiting to happen.



Duckenfield failed to do basic preparation for the semi-final. He did not study relevant paperwork, including the force’s major incident procedure, and signed off the operational plan two days after taking over, before he had even visited the ground.

He turned up to command the semi-final, he admitted, knowing very little about Hillsborough’s safety history: about the crushes at the 1981 and 1988 semi-finals, or that the approach to the Leppings Lane end was a “natural geographical bottleneck” to which Mole carefully managed supporters’ entry.

Duckenfield admitted he had not familiarised himself in any detail with the ground’s layout or capacities of its different sections. He did not know the seven turnstiles, through which 10,100 Liverpool supporters with standing tickets had to be funnelled to gain access to the Leppings Lane terrace, opened opposite a large tunnel leading straight to the central pens, three and four

He did not even know that the police were responsible for monitoring overcrowding, nor that the police had a tactic, named after a superintendent, John Freeman, of closing the tunnel when the central pens were full, and directing supporters to the sides. He admitted his focus before the match had been on dealing with misbehaviour, and he had not considered the need to protect people from overcrowding or crushing.

When a man has to look at next days Daily Mirror (or Sun) and realise that the whole of the front page and back page is a freaking huge image of his 2 daughters - in a cage - as they take the final few breaths of their lives......as they have the air squeezed out of them by the weight that no human can survive.....then I say that he gets to decide when enough time has passed to remember or to forget.

25 years? Long enough? He gets to decide. Not you. Or me.
50 years? He gets to decide.

I would agree it is relevant too, for all the reasons that have been cited. The context at the time was one in which fans were blamed for being fans. This lie could remain in place because of the behaviour of other fans at the time, it made it easy for some people to believe. It made it easy for the police to blame them and get away with blaming them.