Psychology experts testify in Oliver Campbell murder appeal

Experts have testified that brain-damage patient Oliver Campbell’s intellectual limitations made him likely to falsely confess to a crime under police pressure. 

His ability to “express meaning in speech” was that of a seven-and-a-half-year-old, the Court of Appeal was told.

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And, said Mr Campbell's barrister Michael Birnbaum KC, he was subjected to "misleading, bullying and unfair" police interrogations. 

Mr Campbell’s lawyers argued that the failure to recognise his vulnerabilities meant his right to a fair trial was breached. 

His confessions would "undoubtedly" have been deemed unfair and thrown out by today's standards, Mr Birnbaum suggested.

Mr Campbell is appealing against his 1991 conviction for murdering Hackney shopkeeper Baldev Hoondle in a botched armed robbery in July 1990.

However, his appeal has now been adjourned to an unknown date after it overran, meaning the Government never got a chance to explain why it is fighting to uphold the conviction. 

Prosecution barrister John Price has indicated that the Government will fight to exclude new scientific evidence of the severity of Mr Campbell’s mental impairment, but has not yet had a chance to explain why.

Professor Gisli Gudjonsson, who has written several books on false confessions after more than 40 years of research, appeared as an expert witness. 

He has worked on miscarriage of justice cases around the world, he told the court on Thursday, February 29. 

He did tests on Mr Campbell in 1991 and found he showed an “abnormally high” level of acquiescence, “meaning, when he didn’t really understand questions he would just answer in the affirmative,” he testified. 

But as recently as 2003, Professor Gudjonsson had not felt able to say this made Mr Campbell likely to falsely confess to a murder. 

However, in 2021 he produced a new report, finding there was a high risk Mr Campbell had falsely confessed. 

Oliver Campbell was convicted in 1991 of the 1990 murder of shopkeeper Baldev Hoondle. He confessed to police but his legal team says the interviews were improper (Image: Charles Thomson)

He told the judges this new conclusion was based on a combination of advances in science and more information being available, such as probation reports he had never seen before, describing Mr Campbell as “vulnerable and naïve and easily manipulated”. 

“The science tells me that there are numerous cumulative risk factors that increase the likelihood of him having made a false confession,” he said.  

Professor Gudjonsson said Mr Campbell, whose executive function was “very, very poor”, had been subjected to the “extreme” pressure of 14 police interviews in three days, in which his solicitors or appropriate adults - when he had them - “were ineffective, just sitting there very passive whilst the interrogation was going on.”

He testified that he had never seen police interviews before where officers had so persistently criticised and commented on a suspect’s demeanour. 

In one interview, he said, the officer had done it once per minute. 

He raised concerns as early as 1991 about the tactics he had heard on the interview tapes, but heard nothing in response. 

Oliver Campbell and his lawyers Michael Birnbaum and Glyn Maddocks outside the Royal Courts of Justice (Image: Charles Thomson)

Professor Gudjonsson said scientific advances since 1991 had improved understanding of what he repeatedly called Mr Campbell’s “eagerness to please”. 

“It was being made clear to him that the police thought he had done it and he was claiming he hadn’t done it,” he testified. 

“Resistance is breaking down… He was naïve and he was conflicted, thinking about, do I tell the truth or do I lie and I get out of here?”

The court previously heard police interviews in which officers kept putting to Mr Campbell that maybe he had shot Mr Hoondle by accident - a story he later repeated back to them, saying he had thought the gun had no bullets in it. 

Mr Birnbaum described the confession as “a tissue of nonsense” in which almost every detail he gave about his supposed crime was provably wrong. 

Professor Gudjonsson testified: “Eventually, people realise that they are not getting anywhere and think, the only way out now is to say it was an accident.”

He said the phenomenon of false confessions was denied for years until the ability to definitively prove a person's innocence through DNA became available.

Dr Alison Beck, a retired clinical and forensic psychologist and neuropsychologist, shared similar views on Mr Campbell, telling the court he had “extraordinarily low abilities”. 

She said it had only been discovered after his trial that his functioning in one area placed him in the lowest 1% in the population. 

Oliver Campbell suffered brain damage as a baby and has the verbal reasoning skills of a seven-year-old, the Court of Appeal was told (Image: Charles Thomson)

“Although Mr Campbell had a low IQ, he had a much, much lower - relative to his IQ - ability to process information and to hold things in his working memory,” she testified. 

“That was really important to know," she said, as it explained why he might have "accepted misunderstandings" or "made things up; confabulated to try and make sense of things”.

She testified that Mr Campbell was “gregarious”, wanting to be accepted, which may have led police to not fully appreciate how impaired he was. 

“His lack of ability to express himself with words is masked by his affability,” she said. 

Dr Beck said that in addition to science having progressed, so had social attitudes more generally, so more consideration might have been given today, for example, to the fact that Mr Campbell was black and how that also affected the power dynamics between him and police at the time. 

Barrister Rose Slowe told the court that this was not all that had changed. 

“Today, such stark and obvious vulnerabilities would attract a range of reasonable adjustments," she said of the trial process.

These, she contended, would have included an intermediary to help him understand the proceedings, extra court breaks and less adversarial cross-examination. 

“In 1991, Oliver lacked all of the modern safeguarding,” said Ms Slowe, claiming his right to a fair trial had been breached "to such an extent that the appeal could be allowed on this ground alone."

The Government will now have to explain why it is fighting to keep Mr Campbell convicted at an as-yet-unknown later date.