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| THE VOICE MARCH 2023
News Feature
JUSTICE FOR OLIVER: S
Gentle giant with learning difficulties in court bid to clear his name after years in prison EXCLUSIVE by Shirin Aguiar
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T 52, Oliver Campbell should be at the peak of his life. Yet a blow to the head at eight months old left him with life-long impaired memory and reasoning skills. With the help of a campaigning lawyer, Mr Campbell has spent the past 32 years fighting to clear his name of a murder many believe he did not commit. Mr Campbell spent 11 years behind bars after police “stitched him up” for the murder of a shopkeeper in Hackney, northeast London, in 1990. There was no forensic evidence linking him to the scene and, standing at 6ft 3in, he is considerably taller than the pair of robbers who witnesses saw fleeing the shop. The two robbers were roughly the same size and one of them, Eric Samuels, who is 5ft 10in, insists his accomplice was not Mr Campbell. The gentle giant with severe learning difficulties has now launched a new court bid to finally clear his name. Since his
He could not possibly have done what he is supposed to have done release in 2002, he has been on life licence. Yet he has always protested his innocence. “They (the police) stitched me up,” he told The Voice from his home in Ipswich. “The police started knocking on my door, when I was living in West Ham. Then they arrested me and asked me questions. Then after a while I said: “Well alright, I done it.” That admission came after cops extracted the disputed confession after his lawyer had left the police station. He is scathing about police questioning tactics: “The police put you in a room, only one way out, and throw questions at you. And before you can answer that question, they are throwing another question. I thought to myself, ‘They’re trying to stitch me up’. I would say I’m angry at
LOCKED UP: Oliver Campbell made a disputed confession the way it was all thrown at me. They used me as a scapegoat, that’s how I look at it.” Asked how he would sum up his life, Mr Campbell said: “It would be a swear word.” On July 22, 1990, shopkeeper Baldev Singh Hoondle was shot and killed during a robbery at the family off-licence in Lower Clapton Road in Hackney, east London. Police found a Black Knights suede baseball cap near the scene, and matched it to one Mr Campbell had recently bought. A highly vulnerable 19-yearold at the time, he made his disputed confession only after 14 police interviews, and was tried and convicted in 1991. His co-accused, Mr Samuels, admitted to being involved in the robbery and identified the real killer to the police, insisting that Mr Campbell had nothing to do with the murder. The jury was never told this as it was judged as “hearsay”. His lawyer Glyn Maddocks, KC, recalls a prison officer’s remark about Mr Campbell when he first arrived to meet his client. “He said ‘none of the prison officers here think Oliver could have done what he is supposed to have done. He is such a gentle character. I hope you manage to clear his name.’” Mr Maddocks has been trying to do precisely that for 23 years, along with a group of stalwart supporters. He told The Voice: “It’s obvious to anyone spending more than five minutes in Oliver’s company that he could not possibly have done what he is supposed to have done. “How the judge, the jury, the CPS and the police thought that he could have possibly done that
is disgraceful. “It shows the many inadequacies of the criminal justice system. And hence he did ten years in prison for something that he wasn’t capable of doing.”
WEAK
Mr Maddocks added that when instructed with the case, he was told: “The fact he (Mr Campbell) was a big Black guy in 1990/1991 didn’t help, so in other words the jury just thought ‘well let’s lock him up’, without thinking very much about it.” According to Mr Maddocks and Michael Birnbaum, KC, Mr Campbell’s barrister, the case against him rested on the gun-
man wearing his hat at the robbery, and on admissions to police. But the identification evidence was weak, as there was no forensic evidence against Mr Campbell, and the hairs in his hat were not his. Much of the police questioning was ‘misleading and unfair’, his defence claim, and there were ‘many’ breaches of PACE Codes of Practice. All the admissions relied on by the prosecution were made in the absence of a solicitor and some without an appropriate adult. Mr Campbell’s previous lawyer, Arthur Mullinger, went as far as to describe the conduct of the police as “an abuse of po-
lice powers”. Many admissions were “provably false and some were simply absurd”, his legal team say. Mr Campbell told police he had hired a gun but could not say where from. And said he had practised firing the gun in a wood but could not say where. He also claimed to have hung the gun with string under his arm. In a conversation with a police officer shortly after his arrest, Mr Samuels insisted that he did the robbery with a man called “Harvey” who had earlier stolen Oliver’s hat in Leicester Square. Mr Samuels said in legal documents: “When we was up West (End) this Harvey taxed
Ollie’s hat and he couldn’t do nothing about it, so he just went off. That’s how Ollie’s hat got used.” Mr Campbell’s supporters insist he is a trusting, caring man with a sense of humour who happens to have severe learning difficulties which has left him open to people taking advantage of his good nature and his suggestibility. Crucially, according to documents submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), Mr Samuels also told police that Harvey had shot Mr Hoondle. He said Harvey was from Brixton, adding: “He’s done seven years for armed robbery….
