LONDON — A brain-damaged man sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a London shopkeeper had his decades-old conviction overturned on Wednesday by an appeals court concerned by the possibility that police obtained a false confession from a mentally vulnerable man.
Oliver Campbell, who suffered from cognitive impairment as an infant and struggles with his concentration and memory, was 21 when he was jailed in 1991 after being convicted partly based on confessions his lawyer said were coerced.
“The fight for justice is finally over after almost 34 years,” Campbell said. “I can start my life as an innocent man.”
Campbell, now in his 50s, was convicted of the robbery and murder of Baldev Hoondle, who was shot in the head in his shop in the Hackney area of east London in July 1990.
He had an earlier appeal rejected in 1994 and was released from prison in 2002 on conditions that could have sent him back to prison if he got into trouble.
Defense attorney Michael Birnbaum said police lied to Campbell and “drilled and bullied” him into giving a false confession by admitting he pulled the trigger in an accident. He was interviewed more than a dozen times, including sessions without a lawyer or other adult present.
His learning difficulties put him “out of his depth” and he was “simply unable to do justice to himself,” Birnbaum said. He said the confessions were nonsense full of inconsistencies that contradicted the facts of the case.
At trial he testified that he was not involved in the robbery and had been somewhere else but he could not remember where.
A co-defendant, Eric Samuels, who has since died, pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. At the time, he told his attorney that Campbell was not the gunman and later told others that Campbell was not with him during the robbery.
Lawyers continued to advocate for Campbell that he was not the killer and his case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which investigates potential wrongdoing.
The three appeals court judges rejected most of Birnbaum’s grounds of appeal but said they were concerned about the conviction in light of a new understanding of the reliability of confessions made by someone with a mental disability. The panel overturned the verdict as “uncertain” and refused to order a new trial.