Gareth Peirce

Gareth Peirce is an English solicitor, educated at the Cheltenham Ladies' College, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. She is known for her work in high profile cases representing people with Irish and Muslim backgrounds accused of terrorism.

Personal life

Born with the forename Jean, she changed her name to Gareth while still quite young. Her maiden name and date of birth are not known, although in 2008, she was said to be in her 60s and The Sunday Telegraph reported that she was aged 65 in 2005. She is described as being a very private person who shuns the limelight and refuses to be interviewed by the media. She lives in Kentish Town, North London, with her husband, Bill Peirce, son of the American painter Waldo Peirce. They have two adult sons.

Career

In the 1960s, she worked as a journalist in the United States, following the campaign of Martin Luther King. After returning to Britain in the 1970s, having married, she took a postgraduate law degree at the London School of Economics. She joined the firm of the radical solicitor Benedict Birnberg as a trainee, where she continues to work as a senior partner of Birnberg Peirce and Partners. She was admitted to the Roll of Solicitors on December 15, 1978.^{[citation needed]}

In the mid-1970s Peirce supported specific campaigns for reform of laws and police procedures that permitted the prosecution and conviction of persons solely on identification evidence. Individual cases that were then very much in the news - such as the George Davis Is Innocent Campaign alongside numerous others countrywide soon led to the establishment of Justice Against the Identification Laws (J.A.I.L.), an organisation which Peirce supports. During her career she has represented Judith Ward, a woman falsely accused of several IRA related bombing in 1974, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg, a man held in extrajudicial detention by the American government. In 2011, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks appointed her as his lawyer in Swedish Judicial Authority v Julian Assange

Recognition and reception

Her role in the defence of the Guildford Four was dramatised in the 1994 film, In the Name of the Father, with Peirce portrayed by Emma Thompson. She has reportedly never watched the film and stated in 1995 that she was "an extremely unimportant participant in the story" but was "given a seemingly important status".

She was appointed CBE in 1999 for services to justice, but later wrote to Downing Street asking for it to be withdrawn, accepting responsibility and tendering an apology for any misunderstanding.

Sir Ludovic Kennedy, a campaigner against miscarriages of justice dedicated a book to Peirce, calling her "the doyenne of British defence lawyers" and that she "refuses to be defeated in any case no matter how unfavourable it looks". Benedict Birnberg, who first hired her as a lawyer believes she has "transformed the criminal justice scene in this country almost single-handedly".

Michael Gove, a journalist and later a Conservative MP, once described her as being a "passionate, committed and effective supporter of the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance", which he said was committed to destabilising the Establishment. In 2005, Gove told The Sunday Telegraph that as well as serving her clients, she also has an "idealism that is motivated by a political agenda".

Peirce was one of the initial eight people inducted in March 2007 into Justice Denied magazine's Hall of Honor for her lifetime achievement in aiding the wrongly convicted.

Publications

Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, a collection of her essays for the London Review of Books, was published in 2010. Of her defence of Muslim suspects accused of terrorism, Peirce has said:

We have lost our way in this country. We have entered a new dark age of injustice and it is frightening that we are overwhelmed by it. I know I am representing innocent people; innocent people who know that a jury they face will inevitably be predisposed to find them guilty.

• Gareth Peirce speech on Samar and Jawad
• "This covert experiment in injustice", The Guardian (February 4, 2004)
• "Was it like this for the Irish? Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain", London Review of Books (April 10, 2008)
• "The Framing of al-Megrahi", London Review of Books (September 24, 2009)

External links

• Vanity Fair article on Mouloud Sihali, Feb 2008, No. 570