Conviction against man jailed for murder of London shopkeeper in 1991 overturned

Three judges ruled on Wednesday that Oliver Campbell’s conviction for the murder of Baldev Hoondle in Hackney in July 1990 was “not certain”.

Mr Campbell was 21 when he was jailed following a trial at the Old Bailey after he was also convicted of conspiracy to commit robbery.

At a hearing in February, lawyers for Mr Campbell, who suffered severe brain damage as a baby, said he had been “harassed and intimidated” by police into making a false confession.

His case was referred to the Court of Appeal in 2022 by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates possible miscarriages of justice, despite the fact that the Court of Appeal had refused to refer the case in 2005.

While his lawyers told the court in February that this was the “wrong decision”, they said there was “compelling” new evidence that Mr Campbell “could not” be the killer.

In his judgment, Lord Justice Holroyde, who sat at the trial with Mr Justice Bourne and Mrs Justice Stacey, said they had “concluded that the convictions were not safe”.

After the verdict, Campbell, now 50, told the PA news agency: “The fight for justice is finally over after almost 34 years.

“I can start my life as an innocent man.”

Mr Campbell suffered severe brain damage as an eight-month-old baby and continues to have problems with his memory, concentration and retention of information.

His barrister, Michael Birnbaum KC, told the court earlier this year that there were “ample” reasons to question Mr Campbell’s conviction, saying the police had tempted him to falsely admit that the murder was an accident.

Mr Birnbaum said Mr Campbell’s learning disabilities had led him to make confessions that were “simply absurd” and “nonsense” and contained a “litany of contradictions” with the facts of the case.

The court concluded that officers may have “deliberately lied” to extract confessions from Mr Campbell. Campbell was interviewed 14 times, but in some cases no lawyer or appropriate adult was present, which Mr Birnbaum said was a “disgrace”.

Forensic psychologist Professor Gisli Hannes Gudjonsson also told the judges that there was a “high risk” that Campbell’s mental disability led him to make a false confession as a form of “consent” during “relentless” questioning.

Mr Birnbaum said that because of his learning difficulties, Mr Campbell was “overwhelmed” and “simply unable to do justice to himself” when giving evidence.

In her judgment, Lord Justice Holroyde said: “We accept that the verdicts could be different in the light of the new evidence.”

He continued: “A jury aware of the new evidence would examine the credibility of these confessions in a substantially different context.

“Under these circumstances, we cannot say that the new evidence could not have influenced the jury’s decision to convict.”

According to the judges, jurors were told at the original trial that the shooter was wearing a British Knights baseball cap that was found a few hundred yards from the crime scene.

Mr Birnbaum said Mr Campbell had bought the hat in the days before the murder, but that hair found inside it after the shooting was not his and that he was not recognised by Mr Hoondle’s son during a lineup despite being “face to face” with the gunman.

The lawyer said: “The detectives were convinced that he must have been the shooter because he was the owner of the hat and had admitted being present at the robbery. And they were determined to get him to admit that fact.”

He continued: “(Mr Campbell believed) his least bad option would have been to admit it was all an accident and we suspect he thought he could get away with it.”

Mr Campbell’s now deceased co-defendant, Eric Samuels, was acquitted of murder but sentenced to five years in prison after admitting robbery.

The court heard Samuels had told his lawyer that Mr Campbell was not the shooter and that there was “irrefutable” evidence that he had been “telling people for over ten years that Oliver was not with him in the robbery”, but Mr Birnbaum said this had been deemed “inadmissible hearsay” at the original trial.