Oliver Campbell´s Appeal Against Conviction

This blog post has been contributed by Ms Amber Marks, Module Convenor for Evidence.

Oliver Campbell´s appeal against conviction will be of interest to students in the law of evidence. It is attracting media coverage and may turn out to be one of Britain´s longest running miscarriages of justice.  Campbell´s case is being heard in the Court of Appeal and evidence students will be familiar with many of the issues raised, including confession, hearsay and identification evidence. 

Oliver Campbell was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey in 1991.   The killing was of a shopkeeper during the course of a robbery.  Eric Samuels, Campbell´s co-defendant, admitted to being in the shop at the time of the offence and was convicted of robbery.  He has since died.  Samuels named the real culprit but refused to put the information in a statement or give evidence, apparently out of fear of self-incrimination and reprisals of the killer.  Samuels had also told other people, including his solicitor, that Campbell was not the gunman.  The jury was not told of this on account of it being “inadmissible hearsay.”  This is a good example of how the hearsay rule can work against the defence.  It  is evidence that might  be more easily admitted today, since statutory reform of hearsay (Criminal Justice Act 2003).  In fact Michael Birnmbaum KC argues  that this evidence would not be excluded today.

From news reports it seems that the principal ground of appeal is that Campbell´s confessions should have been excluded. According to Michael Birnbaum KC, Campbell suffers from severe learning difficulties, his  confession  was false and is contradicted by other evidence, “Since Oliver hadn’t been there, all he could do was make things up and his account became increasingly divorced from the facts as we know them and increasingly inconsistent.” He says Campbell was “humiliated”  during his police interview, “frequently told that his body language betrayed guilt,” and only confessed as  a result of pressure from police who told him that that confessing to an accidental killing was his “least bad option”. A number of his police interviews were done without a lawyer being present. Forensic psychologist Prof Gisli Hannes Gudjonsson told the appeal courts  there was a “high risk” Campbell’s mental disabilities meant he had given a false confession as a form of “acquiescence” during “relentless” questioning.

When it came to his trial, Birnbuam KC says that Campbell’s learning difficulties meant that he could not do himself justice. He also says that the extent of his learning difficulties were not made clear to the court at the time of his trial. Mr Birnbaum said: “He might well have appeared to the judge and the jury to be a liar when he was simply a mentally challenged young man who was completely out of his depth in giving evidence in front of the jury in what is probably the largest and most intimidating courtroom in the land.” There was some weak identification against Campbell. The witness who identified Campbell had only seen the gunman for a few seconds, and across four lanes of traffic.   Presumably a Turnbull warning will have been given, but how effective do you think this would have been?

Oliver Campbell´s case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.  Helen Pitcher OBE and chair of the CCRC said:  

“It is now clear that, at the time of Mr Campbell’s trial and appeal, the full extent of his vulnerabilities were not properly understood. This meant that the judge didn’t have the full picture when deciding whether his admissions should have been admitted as evidence. It also meant that the jury was unaware of important information about how reliable or otherwise those admissions actually were. 

“We’ve decided that there is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will now overturn his convictions in light of this new evidence and have referred the case for a fresh appeal.” 

The CCRC’s referral also considers changes in the law and practice since Mr Campbell’s conviction, in particular concerning the treatment of vulnerable suspects and the admissibility of hearsay evidence which could have supported his defence case. The CCRC has decided that there is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will conclude that Mr Campbell’s admissions are unreliable and that ultimately his convictions are unsafe.

Regardless of the outcome of Campbell´s case, its facts provide scope for reflection on much that we have learned in the law of evidence.  Reforms that have  taken place since Campbell´s conviction for murder in 1991, like the hearsay reforms in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, might have averted some of the apparent injustices in his case. But  changes to the law on adverse inferences from silence introduced by the  Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 might  put more, and sometimes unfair, pressure on vulnerable defendants. Can you remember reading anything about whether a defendant´s learning difficulties will prevent adverse inferences being drawn where they choose to remain silent instead of taking the stand?

The principal prosecution evidence in Campbell´s trial appears to have been his confession, but how much weight do we think the jury might have given to the identification evidence?  In a short film recently aired on the BBC,  criminologist David Wilson examines a recent case of a man imprisoned for armed bank robbery, convicted on the evidence of four eyewitnesses, including two police officers. He discusses how the eyewitness remains the most compelling evidence in any criminal trial, because it is human and relatable, and yet it can also be extremely unreliable. He reveals how, on appeal, DNA evidence proved that all four eye witnesses in the bank robbery case were incorrect.  Do you think it is right that weak identification is admitted?