The court of appeal has quashed the conviction of a man who has spent 28 years in jail for a violent murder of which he has always claimed he was innocent.
Justin Plummer, now 54, was convicted of the murder of 38-year-old Janice Cartwright-Gilbert in 1998, a year after she was fatally attacked at the building site of her future home near Wilden in Bedfordshire. Her body was found in a burning caravan with multiple stab wounds, a knife and scissors sticking out of her neck. She had been throttled with an electrical flex.
Plummer was a prolific burglar engaged in a robbing spree at the time and had clocked up 24 convictions in the four months leading up to the killing. But none of the convictions involved violence. There was no DNA linking Plummer to the crime, no stolen items were recovered, and no witnesses placed him at the scene.
The original conviction relied almost entirely on footwear mark evidence – an imprint on Cartwright-Gilbert’s head alleged to match a size 6 Nike Air Screech trainer that Plummer wore. The case also partly hinged on the prosecution’s argument that Plummer’s brother, Adam, had discussed his sibling being a suspect with their mother before he was arrested and therefore Plummer must have been guilty.
The expert witness who provided the trainer evidence, David Lewin, was a dentist unqualified in footwear forensics. At the original trial, the judge said in summing up Lewin’s evidence: “It was one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.” But Lewin’s method, using imaging overlays, was later ruled “neither validated nor suitable … even by late 1990s standards”.
In 2021, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred Plummer’s conviction back to the court of appeal on these grounds. In 2023, Plummer, who slept on the floor in prison to protest his innocence, had his conviction overturned. The court ruled that the expert evidence was unreliable and that the verdict was unsafe.
But Plummer was never released. The appeal court’s ruling was immediately challenged by the Crown Prosecution Service and Plummer was convicted again in a retrial in June 2023. This time the prosecution relied on an alleged confession made by Plummer to a now deceased cellmate, Christopher Dunne. Dunne, who had schizophrenia, was a police informant and had not been cross-examined at the original trial. Plummer’s legal team argued that the hearsay evidence was inherently flawed and unreliable.
On Wednesday, in less than 10 minutes, the court of appeal quashed the 2023 conviction. The three judges ruled: “We consider that this conviction is unsafe because the Dunne hearsay evidence should have been withdrawn from the jury even if, which we have not decided, it was properly admitted in the first place. For the reasons we have explained, the Adam Plummer evidence does not support the Dunne evidence but rather gives rise to further serious concerns.”
Plummer’s solicitor, Annalisa Moscardini, said: “Justin Plummer is finally vindicated for his 28-year fight against this murder conviction. Due to his refusal to accept his guilt for a crime he has always been clear he did not commit, he has served far longer than his minimum term of 16 years. Justin’s determination and resilience has finally paid dividends and he will sleep tonight a free man, for the first time in 28 years.”
His barrister, Katy Thorne KC, said: “Permitting a dead cell confession witness in a trial on an allegation of this age was simply unfair. Prisoners have all sorts of motives to give false cell confession evidence and law reform is needed to stop such evidence being part of criminal trials. Now Justin is being released with little support from the state. The system has to be reformed to give proper support to such victims of miscarriage of justice.”
