I shall speak only briefly about the case that was set out so clearly, and in so much detail, by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. Turner).

In one way or another, I have been involved with the case for the past 14 years—initially because Ann Whelan, Michael Hickey's mother, was a constituent of mine and visited my advice bureau. I pay tribute to the dogged determination with which she has argued her son's case for the past 15 years, but I confess that, when she first spoke to me, I was sceptical about her son's innocence. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) will confirm that it has never been my way to assume automatically that cases that he regards as miscarriages of justice are miscarriages of justice. He would say that I had come late to the defence of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford bombers, as they were once wrongly described.

My natural instinct when I first met Mrs. Whelan was to assume that mothers are inclined to believe that sons are innocent. At the time, her son was on the roof of the prison in which he was incarcerated, and I believed then that there was more emotion than evidence to her case. Over the years, however, I have become utterly convinced that the case that she made then was right. Week after week, month after month, additional evidence has been supplied to support that case.

Looking back, I now realise that the case began with the basic ingredient for a miscarriage of justice. Locally, there was a sense of absolute outrage—which was proper and understandable—that a newspaper boy doing his rounds in the morning, wholly unconcerned with what was going on, should stumble on robbers and be shot dead. In my experience, such outrage—fuelled by the newspapers, which say that someone must be convicted and that the case must be speedily resolved—puts pressure on police, which in itself is likely to produce the wrong result. I have no doubt that it was that sense of outrage that began the whole process.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-East pointed out, the entire case rests on Molloy's evidence. I do not want to repeat my hon. Friend's account of how that evidence was obtained, but there is little doubt that Molloy believed—I make no allegation that he was told—that, if he incriminated the men who were eventually convicted of the murder, he would escape on a lesser charge. That is speculation; but it is a fact that, had the events occurred 10 years later, Molloy's evidence would have been discounted, because it was wholly inconsistent with the rules laid down by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.

Molloy was kept for 10 days without proper assistance from a lawyer, and, for much of that time, without any support from his family. The records of his evidence are inadequate by any standards. The pattern continues. After the conviction, when it was known that appeals were likely and that Molloy had recanted—he had announced that he had been wrong to incriminate the other three men—14 visits were made to his cell. They were not recorded in diaries as they should have been, and the conversations that took place in the cell were also not recorded, as would now be required for evidence to be acceptable to the courts. That pattern of what would now be regarded as malpractice characterised the entire process, not simply of obtaining the conviction, but of ensuring that public outrage at the conviction, and the formal appeal, should not have the result that I consider justice to have required.

Two weeks ago, at Question Time, I referred to the strange incident of the bicycle. Although it is a small incident in the overall saga, it is indicative of the sort of procedures that were used. I knew about the bicycle because, during one of her visits to my constituency surgery, Mrs. Whelan had told me that she had heard that there were fingerprints on it, about which we were not being told the full story. The bicycle was exhibited in court, but not much was said about it, although it was standing there in front of the jury. The bicycle was then left in the jury room. The jury, no doubt, felt emotionally involved because it was the bicycle of the innocent paper boy who had pedalled off in the morning and who had met his death when he was shot by robbers at the farm. The jury felt emotionally disturbed by the presence of the boy's bicycle as they considered their verdict.

We now know that there were fingerprints on the bicycle, but we do not know whose they were. We know that the fingerprints were not those of Michael Hickey or the men who were eventually convicted of the murder, but they were never identified. Over 10 years ago, on the suggestion of Mrs. Whelan, I asked the then Home Secretary about the fingerprints and he gave me an answer that I can describe only as evasive. He said that he knew nothing of them and referred me to the local police. The local police gave me an answer that was equally uninformative. It was not until months afterwards that we discovered that another person had been present at the crime scene—the fingerprints proved it, but that evidence was not provided during the trial.

When I asked the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Kirkhope), about this the other day, he said that the defence counsel had known this before the appeal. The defence counsel certainly did not know it at the time of the trial. Indeed, the principal counsel, now a High Court judge, has said publicly that had he known it at the time of the trial, he would have asked for the scene of crime officer to be called in evidence and he would have cross-examined him about the possibility of other persons being there. That is just one example, but I could give many more—and I am sure that my hon. Friends will give many more.

I conclude by making one simple point. Michael Hickey had many misfortunes: the misfortune that he was implicated in a crime about which there were proper feelings of outrage; the misfortune that the police were determined to find someone to convict; the misfortune that a man—Molloy—believed it was to his advantage to incriminate others to receive a lighter sentence; the misfortune that the evidence of that man, which was recanted, was not available to the appeal because he died of a heart attack; and the misfortune that he appealed two or three years too early.

I do not mean that Michael Hickey's mother and those who supported him were over-enthusiastic; I mean that he went to appeal at a time when the Court of Appeal was taking the hardest possible line on these matters. I believe that had the appeal taken place in the new circumstances—when a different attitude and a different Lord Chief Justice prevail—a different result would have been obtained. For those reasons and because of the dubiety that covers so much of the evidence, I am sure that the Home Secretary should resubmit the case to the court. I hope that the Under-Secretary will tell us that that course has not entirely been ruled out.

I do not always understand the arcane language of the law, but as I understand the Home Secretary's response, he has said that he has not quite made up his mind not to do it; he has nearly made up his mind not to do it, but there is still a chink of hope that he might do it. I hope that that chink of hope can be extended. I am absolutely certain that, sooner or later, as has been the case in other examples of the miscarriage of justice, Michael Hickey will come out of prison. It will be righted sooner or later. It will be a tragedy if he is allowed to stay in prison unjustly for any longer than is necessary. There must be an immediate submission to the Court of Appeal.