Patrick Radden Keefe’s Portrait of a Crisis-Ridden Country

On November 21, 1974, the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated bombs in two pubs in Birmingham, England, as part of its campaign to get the British out of Ireland. Twenty-one people were killed, and nearly 200 were injured. It was at the time the deadliest attack in England since the days of V-2 rockets. The police immediately sprang into action, arrested six completely innocent Irishmen, and coerced confessions from them. When the men challenged their convictions, the leading judge of hi...