Gerard "Gerry" Conlon (1 March 1954-21 June 2014) was a Northern Irish man who, along with three other members of the "Guildford Four", was wrongly accused of being a Provisional IRA member during The Troubles.
Biography[]
Gerard Conlon was born in Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland on 1 March 1954, the son of a factory worker and a hospital cleaner. In 1974, he moved to England to escape the violence of The Troubles and to find work, and he lived with a group of squatters in London when he was arrested for the Guildford pub bombings in 1975. Conlon, Paddy Armstrong, Paul Hill, and Carole Richardson were charged with carrying out the bombings, and they were wrongly sentenced to life in prison. Conlon was tortured into making a false confession, and the "Guildford Four" were released in October 1989 after the Court of Appeal in London found out that the police had falsified their confessions. He suffered two nervous breakdowns during his transition to civilian life, and he became suicidal, an alcoholic, and a drug addict, and he would later become a civil rights activist. He died on 21 June 2014 of lung cancer at the age of 60.