The Appeal

by Prof. Gísli Guðjónsson CBE

(excerpt for the 2nd edition of Sugar Paper Theories, 2019)

The Court Case Review Commission ultimately decided that the convictions of five men over the deaths of Guðmundur and Geirfinnur could be appealed, and the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on that appeal on 27 September 2018. 

I got there early and sat in the middle of the court. The families of Tryggvi Runar, who died in 2009, and Sævar, who died in 2011, were in the front row, where Erla soon joined them. Guðjón, Albert and Kristján Vidar didn’t attend, but as we waited for proceedings to begin, Guðjón’s wife, Klara, arrived and sat beside me. 

The atmosphere was tense. Getting here had been a long and arduous journey on the part of Kristján Vidar, Guðjón, Albert and the families of Sævar and Tryggvi Runar, as well as their lawyers and a cast of journalists, politicians and expert witnesses who had taken up their cause with fierce dedication.

Earlier that month, the lawyers of the five convicted men had presented cogent and sound arguments for their acquittal. Both the special prosecutor, Davíð Þór Björgvinsson, and the Court Cases Review Commission, had recommended the Supreme Court find in their favour, and the judges were under close international scrutiny. So, I believed the odds were in favour of justice. But I wasn’t sure. Since 1980, the Supreme Court had repeatedly rejected  challenges to this miscarriage of justice. 

The judgment was read out and the convictions of the five men were quashed. The energy that shot through the room brought me back to the Central Criminal Court in London on 19 October 1989, when the Guildford Four were acquitted. But for me, it was personal this time. I felt a stain wiped from my native land. After many years of chipping away, we had finally broken through the ice. Their names cleared, the surviving defendants and the families of the men who died as convicted killers are in talks with government over compensation. 

Where the judgement failed was in disclosing and confronting what went wrong during the investigation in the 1970s, in the work of the police, prosecution and judiciary. The causes the Supreme Court chose not to elucidate are familiar from wrongful convictions in the UK and the US, but involve factors particular to this Icelandic story: The extreme use of solitary confinement and interrogation, lines blurred between the police, criminal court and prosecution, and the unprecedented media frenzy that swept up as the investigation gained momentum. There were systemic failures across various organisations, and in particular the police, the prosecution, Sídumúli Prison, the Reykjavík Criminal Court and the Supreme Court. 

Despite the electrifying sense of history being made, my thoughts that day in court were also with Erla, whose conviction for perjury had not been considered by the Supreme Court. Erla’s lawyer, Ragnar Aðalsteinsson, had argued her case convincingly before the Court Cases Review Commission two years earlier, but the commission ignored crucial evidence in its report and decided that the three convictions for perjury could not be appealed. Ragnar put this down either to ‘gross neglect’ or ‘intent’. Intent would imply that the commission deliberately sidestepped the grounds for Erla’s appeal to protect the police and judiciary. The very heart of the case, the manufacture of false narratives and memories, and who is to blame for these lies, has yet to be thawed by public exposure and accountability. 

This has been a story of immeasurable and persistent suffering for the defendants and their families. The story of what happened to Guðmundur Einarsson and Geirfinnur Einarsson, the men under whose names this story is told, is no less a mystery than it was when their families awoke four decades ago to find them vanished. 

*Since Sugar Paper Theories was first release in 2016, all of the victims (except Erla Bolladóttir) had their wrongful convictions overturned. Erla’s conviction was eventually overturned in 2020.