Lawyers last week told the Court of Appeal why they believe Hackney murder convict Oliver Campbell is 'an innocent man'. Here's our round-up of the case so far...
Prosecutors took a brain-damaged man to trial over a Hackney murder despite having intelligence that another man committed the crime, the Court of Appeal has heard.
Oliver Campbell was convicted in 1991 of shooting shopkeeper Baldev Hoondle in a botched robbery.
Jurors were not told his supposed accomplice had admitted his own involvement but told police Mr Campbell was innocent, even naming the man he said was the real killer.
Lawyers want Mr Campbell’s conviction quashed, saying such crucial evidence could not be hidden from jurors today.
Mr Campbell, then 19, had the mental age of a seven-year-old. He admitted shooting Mr Hoondle after being subjected to what one expert called “dangerous” police interview tactics.
Lawyers called his confession “a tissue of nonsense” containing many provably incorrect details.
“Oliver is an innocent man,” said barrister Michael Birnbaum KC.
“We do not have what I would call a smoking gun. We don’t have exculpatory DNA or fingerprint or anything that is physical proof that he wasn’t there.
“What we do have is a combination of facts so powerful as to give rise to the gravest concerns that an innocent man was wrongly convicted.”
The Crime
In July 1990, two black men attempted to rob the G and H Supermarket in Lower Clapton Road.
Hardip Hoondle triggered the panic alarm and one of the men then began tussling with his father Baldev Hoondle, “holding something silver in his hand”.
“All I heard was a bang,” he said.
“My father fell to the ground… I noticed he was bleeding from the neck.”
The robbers fled, discarding clothes on route, including the killer’s distinctive baseball cap.
Mr Campbell became a suspect because he bought the same cap a week before the shooting.
The ID
Mr Campbell did not match descriptions of the shooter, said Mr Birnbaum.
Hardip Hoondle, who looked the man in the face for a significant period of time, told police: “I can say definitely that I think I will recognise this man again.”
Yet he did not recognise Mr Campbell in a line-up.
He said the shooter was the same height as his 5ft 9inch tall father. Mr Campbell is 6ft 3ins tall.
Other witnesses also described the shooter as around 5ft 10ins tall.
The killer shot Mr Hoondle at a right-angle to left side of his head – the killer’s right side – as they grappled face-to-face.
Mr Campbell is left-handed. Brain damage suffered as a baby left him with limited use of his right arm.
The Confession
Mr Campbell was charged with murder after making “clearly false, pressured admissions”, said Mr Birnbaum, following “bullying and unfair” police interrogations.
The court heard interviews in which officers kept suggesting Mr Campbell had shot Mr Hoondle by accident, perhaps thinking the gun was empty – the exact explanation he eventually gave.
But his confession – given after police “manipulated” circumstances to interview him without a lawyer, said Mr Birnbaum – was full of errors.
He incorporated false details fed to him by police and even got the colour of his supposed gun wrong.
Mr Birnbaum said the “absurd” confession was obtained by “a disgraceful series of interviews of a kind that no police officer today would dream of conducting”.
Tests the following year found Mr Campbell showed “abnormally high” acquiescence, meaning “when he didn’t really understand questions he would just answer in the affirmative”.
The Accomplice
Another man arrested over the robbery, Eric Samuels, admitted his own involvement but told police Mr Campbell was innocent.
In December 1990, he told officers: “I was going to tell you before but the solicitor told me not to… Oliver wasn’t there… It was someone else.”
Samuels said he and a man called Harvey had encountered Mr Campbell on the day of the shooting and stolen his hat.
The hat discarded by the shooter contained two male hair samples, neither of which was a DNA match to Mr Campbell.
Samuels and Harvey robbed the shop, he told police.
“He went in and did it and he f***ing shot him,” he said. “He’s a crazy man… He done it. He shot him. Not me.”
But on legal advice, Samuels would not sign a statement or testify at Mr Campbell’s trial. As he could not therefore be cross-examined, his account was kept from the jury.
“As you know, such a thing would not happen today,” Mr Birnbaum told appeal judges.
He added that Samuels (now dead) had repeated this story numerous times, including to an undercover BBC Rough Justice reporter more than ten years later.
“Oliver wasn’t there,” he said on the BBC recording. “It’s not even nothing to do with him.”
Lowest 1%
Mr Campbell’s case was referred to the Court of Appeal based on what Mr Birnbaum called “powerful fresh evidence as to the risk of false confession”.
Two psychologists testified that scientific advances now enabled experts to say he was likely to falsely confess.
Dr Alison Beck said Mr Campbell’s “extraordinarily low abilities” put him in the lowest 1% of the population by one measure. His ability to “express meaning in speech” is akin to a seven-year-old.
“Although Mr Campbell had a low IQ, he had a much, much lower – relative to his IQ – ability to process information and to hold things in his working memory,” she said, meaning he might have “made things up; confabulated to try and make sense of things”.
Professor Gisli Gudjonsson said Mr Campbell had faced “extreme” pressure, testifying that he had never seen interviews where police so persistently negatively commented on a suspect’s demeanour.
In one interview, he said, an officer did it once per minute.
They also “lied”, the court heard, claiming they had forensic evidence and “lots of witnesses” linking Mr Campbell to the crime scene.
In fact, no forensics have ever linked Mr Campbell to the crime.
“It was being made clear to him that the police thought he had done it,” said the professor.
“Resistance is breaking down… He was naïve and he was conflicted… Eventually people realise that they are not getting anywhere and think, the only way out now is to say it was an accident.”
Barrister Rose Slowe said Mr Campbell’s mental impairment put him at a disadvantage not only in police interviews but in court, meaning he did not receive a fair trial.
“Today, such stark and obvious vulnerabilities would attract a range of reasonable adjustments,” she said. “In 1991, Oliver lacked all of the modern safeguarding.”
Mr Birnbaum said he was “baffled” as to why the government was fighting to uphold the conviction.
The court heard prosecutors will ask for all new scientific evidence of Mr Campbell’s impairment to be ruled “inadmissible”.
But the hearing overran, meaning their reasoning will be heard at a later date.
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