Jon Robins reports on the long struggle for justice of the victims & survivors of the 1989 tragedy
For all the coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy since last month’s inquest verdict, it is easy to overlook the horror of the day. Daniel Gordon’s two-hour documentary Hillsborough, shown on BBC2 earlier this month, was a harrowing and timely reminder of the scale and terror of what happened on 15th April 1989. Fans, families and the police spoke of the Lepping Lanes crush in horrific and unsparing detail. “It was like looking at fish in a trawler net,” one officer said.
Then there was the horror of a cover-up fully exposed in the inquest verdict of “unlawfully killing”. “The price of Hillsborough isn’t reducible to 96 people dying,” Professor Phil Scraton said. “The price of Hillsborough is the price of institutional injustice.”
That reflection came at the point in the film covering one of the lowest points of the Hillsborough campaign, the failed private prosecution of the match commander David Duckenfield and his deputy Bernard
