Tim Harris reports on a major miscarriage of justice.

On 11th September, Oliver Campbell received the news that he’d waited far too long for: judges at the Court of Appeal had quashed his conviction for the murder of a Hackney shopkeeper. His 34-year nightmare was over.

I first met Ollie in 1990 when campaigning against the Poll Tax in East London. At the time, anti-Poll Tax campaigners were leafletting the hundreds of people summoned to court for non-payment. We advised them of their rights and offered a ‘McKenzie Friend’ to assist in court. Lots of people never previously involved in any kind of campaigning were offering their support and Ollie, a 19-year-old Black man, was one of many. He helped us leaflet Stratford Magistrates Court, joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and came along to a few meetings.

The last of these was at Durning Hall in Forest Gate at the end of November 1990. I gave Ollie a lift home to West Ham after the meeting. It was obvious that while he had an intellectual disability, he clearly had a powerful sense of injustice, hated the Thatcher government – and had a wicked sense of humour. Little did either of us know what was to happen next.

Early the following morning, a friend called me with alarming news: he’d heard on the London news that someone by the name Oliver Campbell had been arrested in West Ham on suspicion of involvement in a murder. “Could it be our Oliver?” asked Pat. Well, it was. His nightmare had begun. When I first visited Ollie, on remand in Feltham Young Offender Institution, he seemed totally bewildered and I feared he might be a suicide risk. But with support from friends and his foster mother, he survived that experience and many ordeals to follow.

The shooting

On 22nd July 1990, Baldev Hoondle had been shot and killed during a robbery at his family off-licence on the Lower Clapton Road in Hackney, East London. It was a horrific crime, and the police were under enormous pressure to make arrests – fast. An eyewitness recalled seeing two men fleeing the scene, one of whom was wearing a distinctive “British Knights” baseball cap. Oliver, who had recently purchased such a cap, was later arrested and interviewed 14 times over three days. There was no solicitor present for some interviews – despite Oliver’s learning vulnerabilities. He was put under extreme pressure, with much of the questioning misleading and unfair, with breaches of Police and Criminal Evidence Act Codes of Practice. Finally, in interview 11, he ‘admitted’ to the murder, though none of the descriptions of how he had done it were credible.

The first of the prosecution’s strands of evidence was identification, yet the victim’s son, who witnessed the shooting, did not pick out Oliver at an ID parade and described the two assailants as being of similar height. In fact, Eric Samuels, his co-defendant, was 5’10”; Oliver was 6’3”. Their second line of argument was that the British Knights hat found near the shop belonged to Oliver – yet it contained none of his hair. That meant that when the case came to trial in December 1991, the prosecution relied heavily on his confession to secure a conviction. The jury knew that he had learning vulnerabilities with impaired memory and reasoning skills, but an expert report at the time concluded that he was not abnormally suggestible. In December 1991, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty of conspiracy to rob and murder, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Long campaign

There followed an unsuccessful appeal in 1994, an HMP tour of England (Brixton, Wormwood Scrubs, Gartree, Swaleside, Maidstone and Hollesley Bay), a 48-hour hunger strike in 1997 with other victims of miscarriages of justice, a Rough Justice documentary presented by Kirsty Wark in 2002, and a failed attempt to get the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to refer the case in 2005. Deemed no risk to the public, Oliver was released from prison on licence in 2002 but still desperately wanted to clear his name, and start to lead a normal life.

Fast-forward to 2020, and the tireless efforts of campaigners, Oliver’s legal team of Michael Birnbaum KC and Glyn Maddocks KC (acting pro bono), and former MP for Ipswich Sandy Martin got the case back to the CCRC. They approached the same forensic psychologist expert, Professor Gisli Gudjonsson, who concluded that he had not properly understood Oliver’s vulnerabilities at the time of the trial, nor at his 1994 appeal.

The CCRC’s view when referring the case in 2022 was that the trial judge did not have the full picture when deciding whether Oliver’s admissions should have been admitted as evidence, and jury members were unaware of important information concerning the reliability of the admissions. 

In delivering their recent verdict, the Appeal Court judges agreed that, “As a result of the fresh expert evidence, the whole approach to the case would now be informed by a different and better understanding of relevant factors.” On that basis they concluded that the conviction was unsafe.

Life would always have been tough for Oliver, but the fact remains that he’s been robbed of anything approaching a normal life. In his words, “I could have had a full-time job, kids, got married, maybe go on holiday.”

What went wrong

Back in 2002, Kirsty Wark had described Ollie’s case as one of the worst miscarriages of justice she’d come across. The documentary she presented highlighted the vulnerability of people with severe learning difficulties. But that was more than 20 years ago. The criminal justice system is not properly funded. The CCRC had a budget of £7 million in 2003-04, but Tory austerity had slashed this to £5.6 million by 2017-18. Inevitably, cases were dealt with more slowly.

Quite rightly, the police were under pressure to make quick arrest in 1990, but why was Oliver’s co-defendant Eric Samuels ignored when he said someone else – not Ollie – had acted with him? Was this a simple error by the police, or were they trying to protect someone else, an informant perhaps? In the absence of greater police accountability, miscarriages like this are still possible. 

After the verdict, Ollie told me: “I’m on cloud nine. And it’s gonna take a cherry-picker to get me off it.”

Tim Harris is a member of Leyton & Wanstead CLP.

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