Earlier this month, Oliver Campbell's Hackney murder conviction was finally quashed after 33 years. But Court of Appeal judges still rejected almost every ground of appeal that his lawyers advanced. So does this decision actually spell bad news for those campaigning to overturn two more East End murder convictions?
On Wednesday, September 11, Oliver Campbell and a small group of supporters gathered at a friend’s home and waited to hear whether he was still a convicted murderer.
It had been 33 years since a jury convicted him of shooting Hackney shopkeeper Baldev Hoondle. He’d done ten years in prison and been subject to strict licence conditions ever since. He couldn’t travel abroad or even go to stay with loved ones without government permission.
After decades of campaigning to clear his name, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) – the official watchdog for investigating potential miscarriages of justice – finally referred Oliver to the Court of Appeal in 2022. His case was heard over three days in spring 2024. He had been waiting months for the judges’ decision.
At 10am, as television and newspaper reporters across the land waited for the judgment to appear online, Oliver received a call from his long-serving, and long-suffering, lawyer Glyn Maddocks KC.
The conviction had been quashed.
Oliver was elated. The first thing he would do, he told the Hackney Gazette, was look into travelling to the USA to visit relatives. But the whole of his first day as a truly free man was consumed by media interviews.
“It was an exhausting day,” said supporter Maggie Barradell. “TV after TV, press after press.”
So it took while, said Maggie, to actually read the court’s 30-page decision and let it sink in. As it did, the elation subsided and a disquiet set in.
The judges permitted the appeal on a single “narrow” ground: that scientific advances now laid bare the starkness of Oliver’s mental handicap, which might today cause jurors to look differently upon the fact that he had, on more than one occasion, confessed to killing Mr Hoondle.
Everything else had been dismissed.
On July 22, 1990, two black men attempted to rob the G&H supermarket in Lower Clapton Road. Mr Hoondle tackled the one with the gun. It went off. He was shot in the head at point blank range.
Oliver didn’t match witnesses’ descriptions of the shooter. No forensics ever linked him to the crime. He became a suspect, aged 19, because his baseball cap was found near the crime scene.
Oliver had been severely brain damaged as a baby, but police subjected him to 14 interviews in two days, some without a lawyer present. It was at the end of the second day, when police pulled him back into the interview room after his lawyer had gone home, that Oliver confessed. His story was at odds with the known facts, and he quickly recanted. But in 1991, a jury convicted him of murder.
At his 2024 appeal, expert psychologists testified that Oliver had the mental age of a seven-year-old and extremely high acquiescence. Eager to please, and to cover-up his own mental handicap, he would pretend to understand things he didn’t and, when in doubt, just answer in the affirmative. His complex disability was a recipe for a false confession.
But his lawyers advanced numerous additional grounds of appeal. Excerpts were played to the court of what his lawyer called “misleading, bullying and unfair” police interviews which, by today’s standards, would amount to misconduct.
The lawyers also revealed that another man, who admitted being one of the two robbers, had told police Oliver was innocent. He told the police he and his real accomplice, who he named, had robbed Oliver of his baseball cap earlier in the day, then gone looking for a shop to rob. That was how Oliver's cap ended up at the scene.
The authorities knew this information before Oliver even went to trial, but continued trying to convict him anyway. The self-confessed real robber went on to repeat his exonerating statements about Oliver at least three more times over the next decade, including to the BBC. That BBC audio was played to the court.
So Oliver’s supporters were crestfallen when Court of Appeal judges rejected all this evidence as a meritless attempt to re-argue Oliver’s trial. His conviction was quashed by the slimmest of margins, purely over the improved modern understanding of his disability. The judges even strongly considered ordering a retrial, despite Oliver having already served his sentence. It was, said Jon Robins, secretary to Government’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Miscarriages of Justice, “the most begrudging” way to quash a conviction.
Maggie hasn’t yet sat down with Oliver and talked through the intricacies of the judges’ decision, not wanting to “burst his bubble”. But, she said, "None of us are happy about it."
Former Ipswich MP Sandy Martin, who raised Oliver’s case in Parliament, attributed the court’s ruling to “the absolute determination of the justice system to protect itself from criticism.”
The worst thing about that, he said, is that “it makes it more difficult to prevent mistakes in the future.”
“They are shutting the doors as far as they can,” said Maggie, who met Oliver while working as Sandy’s office manager. “That’s my interpretation. They’re pulling up the drawbridge.”
Oliver has scrambled across that drawbridge just in time, said Glyn. But a judgment like this in what he calls a “blatant and obvious” miscarriage of justice could have real implications for others contesting convictions through the CCRC.
“The Court of Appeal seems to be raising the bar higher and higher for themselves,” said Glyn – and the CCRC is not allowed to refer a case to the court unless it feels there is a “real possibility” the conviction will be overturned. So when the court issues judgments like these, said Glyn, the result is a downward spiral: the more reluctant the court is to allow grounds of appeal, the fewer cases the CCRC can refer.
This is not just Glyn’s view. The APPG found the same thing in a 2021 report, and more recently, in July 2024, Chris Henley KC described the watchdog’s practice in a report as “thinking of reasons why the Court of Appeal might reject the referral”, rather than aspiring to overturn miscarriages of justice.
The CCRC originally rejected Oliver’s case. It was only after Sandy had raised the matter in the House of Commons that it agreed to take another look. To Glyn, the resulting Court of Appeal judgment spells bad news for future applicants.
“I think we are getting to a stage where it’s only going to be the black-and-white Malkinson-type cases that the CCRC are confident about referring,” he said.
But even Andrew Malkinson – exonerated in 2023 by DNA after serving 20 years for a rape he hadn’t committed – was rejected by the CCRC. The Henley review found the CCRC had cost him up to 10 extra years in prison by twice failing to refer his case, even though the exonerating DNA was already available.
For Sandy Martin, the referral of Oliver’s case shows improvement at the CCRC. But some suspect he was only referred because he had an MP like Sandy championing his cause. Other miscarriage of justice campaigners say such proactive MPs are hard to come by.
Seven miles east of Lower Clapton Road, where Baldev Hoondle was shot, there used to be a pub called the Valentine. Outside that pub, in Perth Road, Ilford, 42-year-old Robert Darby sustained a fatal stab wound to the heart.
Kirstie Moore’s brother Jason, who had come forward as a witness in the August 2005 killing, found himself charged with the murder when a single eyewitness, who had already provided police with a string of provably incorrect details about the incident, picked Jason out of a photo line-up seven years after the fact.
Jason neither matched that witness’s original description of the killer, nor resembled the other man the same witness had previously fingered as the killer. Like Oliver, no forensics linked him to the crime.
But a jury convicted Jason at the Old Bailey in 2013. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of 18 years.
The evidence against Jason is so thin that even Robert Darby’s family are campaigning to quash his conviction. In 2021, retired Metropolitan Police detectives handed a report to the CCRC, convinced Jason was innocent. They urged the body to DNA-test evidence seized from an alternative suspect and to re-interview the witness who picked Jason from the line-up. But the CCRC refused, wrongly claiming in its “statement of reasons” that Jason had been implicated by two eyewitnesses, not one – a mistake it refused to correct once pointed out.
Alas, said Kirstie, when she went looking for a Sandy Martin figure to help Jason, she got nowhere.
“The MPs all say the same thing,” she sighed. “They all say, ‘I can’t get involved in specific cases, but you should contact the CCRC’.”
Such responses are particularly galling, she said, because they aren’t true. MPs can get involved in specific cases. Sandy Martin championed Oliver. James Arbuthnot backed the postmasters. Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
“The CCRC was heralded as this great new thing that would help with miscarriages of justice,” Kirstie said. “In reality, it’s just a bin that MPs can direct all correspondence about miscarriages of justice straight into. They’re all sending you to this body that everyone knows doesn’t work.
"In the end, I got so frustrated that I went to Downing Street and handed in a petition raising concerns about the CCRC. I got back a letter saying, ‘Sorry, the Prime Minister can’t get involved. Write to your local MP’. It’s like a hamster wheel. You just get sent around in a circle.”
Eventually, Newsquest – which runs the Moore and Darby families’ local newspapers – took up the case and did what the CCRC had refused to do: re-interviewed the eyewitness. He blurted out that he had been “drunk” when he witnessed the stabbing, that police had known all along that he was drunk, and said he wasn’t sure he had identified the right man.
Our audio recording is now the basis of a second CCRC application on Jason’s behalf.
“If the CCRC had done its job in the first place, perhaps this witness would have made the same disclosure to them several years ago, rather than leaving it up to a journalist and putting Jason’s appeal years behind where it should be,” wrote the Bishop of Stepney Joanne Grenfell, one of Jason’s most vocal supporters, in a letter to new Labour Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Mrs Mahmood publicly criticised the CCRC after the Henley review and called for its chairwoman’s removal, but the Government’s response to Bishop Grenfell’s letter was to say it couldn’t interfere in an ongoing CCRC investigation.
Neither Kirstie nor the bishop was impressed.
"They know and admit that the CCRC is not working – yet are willing to let the current cases carry on while they call for reforms they know will take years to implement. It’s just insane,” Kirstie seethed.
“Every day, I wake up terrified. Because if our case doesn’t get dealt with properly, we can’t just apply again because there won’t be any new evidence.”
Her concern has only grown since Newsquest revealed that another murder case, nine miles east, which also involves recently recanted evidence by the star prosecution witness, has just been turned down by the CCRC.
The recipient of that decision was Julie Major, an NHS worker who is trying to overturn family friend Mark ‘Ozzy’ Osborne’s conviction.
Ozzy’s is an unusual case. He was convicted of a murder committed in the outside world while he was already locked up in prison over a fight with a doorman. He was implicated in the shooting of drug-dealer Mark Tredinnick by what is known in the legal world as a “jailhouse snitch”: a prisoner who strikes a deal for leniency in their own case, in return for implicating a fellow inmate in a crime.
The witness in Ozzy’s case was an illegal immigrant with 12 aliases and convictions for ABH, GBH and robbery with a firearm. In return for claiming he had overheard a phone call implicating Ozzy in the murder, his planned deportation was cancelled.
Mr Tredinnick was lured to a country lane in Romford in June 2007 by Ozzy’s drug-dealer brother Tony, and Tony’s friend Wayne Collins. Tredinnick was sprayed with a machine gun in front of his petrified partner and four-year-old child. The prosecution contended it was revenge for a perceived double-crossing in their drugs enterprise.
The prison witness originally claimed to have heard Ozzy order Tredinnick’s murder in a phone call. However, that story was conclusively proved false. Telephone logs proved no such call had ever been made or received. But instead of dismissing the witness as a liar, the authorities allowed him to radically change his story, now claiming he’d heard Ozzy being informed of the murder after it happened. That revised story, despite demonstrating no foreknowledge or planning on Ozzy’s part, was sufficient for a jury to convict him under joint enterprise.
Ozzy was sentenced to life with a minimum of 30 years.
In recent years, Tony has stopped protesting his own innocence and admitted his guilt, enabling him to sign a sworn statement which says his brother Ozzy is innocent, having had no involvement at all. Miraculously, Julie was contacted at around the same time by the prison witness, who said he wanted to recant.
Believing this would surely secure Ozzy’s freedom, Julie immediately informed the CCRC of the witness's approach. The CCRC spoke to him and recounted the conversation in a report.
“[The witness] said he was now in his 40s and had given thought and doesn’t want the guilt hanging over him,” the CCRC wrote. “He said he was younger and gave the wrong evidence.”
The man claimed Ozzy had annoyed him in prison, so he had got him back by falsely linking him to the murder.
But the CCRC dismissed his dramatic U-turn and rejected Ozzy’s case.
“The CCRC does not believe that the Court of Appeal would agree to receive this information,” a commissioner wrote.
Perhaps the CCRC was right.
The Court of Appeal had given short shrift to the self-confessed robber in Oliver Campbell’s case, who’d spent a decade trying to raise the alarm about an innocent man serving time for someone else's crime. So why would the court give any more credence to Ozzy’s jailhouse snitch?
This is the downward spiral described by Glyn Maddocks in action: if a particular class of evidence is rejected by the court in one case, how can the CCRC then find the requisite “real possibility” it will quash another conviction based on the same sort of evidence?
Of course, to Julie, the dismissal is an outrage and an affront to common sense. She has filed an appeal.
“It defies belief,” she fumed. “He was the most important witness against Ozzy. Nobody else ever said Ozzy was involved.
“The CCRC is not there to help victims of miscarriages of justice. It’s there to help the Government and the Court of Appeal keep innocent people in prison. Andrew Malkinson proves that. Mark proves that. Jason proves that. Someone somewhere has got to step in and do something about this. This is a crime in itself, really – because this is a sham body. It’s a sham organisation.
“I’m not going to let it go. Something has got to change. I will make someone listen to me. Because this is people’s lives. This is Ozzy’s life. He will never get these years back. Jason will never get these years back. Andrew Malkinson will never get those years back.”
The CCRC has a policy of not commenting on active cases like Jason’s and Ozzy’s.
Of Oliver’s case, it said: “The Court of Appeal judgment makes clear that its decision is based on fresh evidence from recent research work and that the understanding of the factors which may contribute to a false confession has increased.
“It also states that there have been important developments in the law relating to admissibility of evidence, and in matters of practice and procedure relevant to a fair trial.”
It otherwise declined to comment on Glyn's views.
The CCRC has acknowledged and apologised for the failings in Andrew Malkinson’s case.
“We will learn from the mistakes that were made,” it said. “Mr Henley’s recommendations will be acted upon and work to address them has already started. We believe that the steps we are taking in response to our reflections upon what went wrong in Mr Malkinson’s case will help to ensure that we enhance our ability to find, investigate and refer miscarriages of justice.”
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here