A man who has spent 26 years of his life sleeping on the floor of his prison cell in protest against a conviction for a 1998 murder is to have his appeal heard next week.

Justin Plummer had his conviction overturned four years ago after the only forensic evidence linking him to the killing was discredited. Despite being 10 years over tariff and having spent more than half his life in prison for a crime he has always insisted had nothing to do with him, the Crown Prosecution Service pushed for a re-trial. Plummer, was then reconvicted in June 2023 after 33 days in court and sentenced to a minimum term of 16 years.

Next week, Justin Plummer case once again appears before the Court of Appeal – the now 54-year-old man was given a leave to appeal on the basis of cell confession evidence.

• You can read about his case in article in UnHerd today

The attack on Janice Cartwright-Gilbert on February 27, 1997 was deranged. The 38-year-old woman had been living on her property in a mobile home with her partner as her house was built. Her dead body had been dragged out of a burning caravan with multiple stab wounds, a knife and scissors sticking out of her neck and having been throttled by an electric flex.

Justin Plummer was a prolific burglar and active in the area at the time of her killing – he had is 24 convictions for theft and burglary in the four months up to the murder.

But nothing in a long list of previous convictions suggested he was capable of such a psychotic attack. Nor was there any forensic evidence linking Plummer to the killing, other a stamp-print on the woman’s head which (the original jury was told) was a match with a pair of size 6’ Nike trainers that he wore on his robbing spree.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, having rejected an application from Plummer two decades prior, finally referred his conviction back to the Court of Appeal in February 2021. They did so on the basis that the sole forensic evidence linking Plummer to the murder was ‘fundamentally flawed’. In July that year, the Appeal judges agreed.

Lord Justice Fulford ruled that there was ‘no evidence’ to suggest that it had to be Plummer’s trainer. The judge was highly critical of the expert’s evidence at the original trial which was given by a dentist called David Lewis specialising in bitemark evidence. he claimed to developed a new technique relying on using imaging software to scan print and transferring the results onto a transparent film. Lewin told the jury, in the words of the trial judge, it was ‘one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.’

Fulford ruled that Lewin’s technique was ‘neither validated nor suitable… either in the late 1990s or today’. The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction; but Fulford insisted on a retrial; despite more than a quarter of a century passing since his first conviction and (as his lawyers argued) the loss of key evidence by Bedford Police including the victim’s clothing.

‘Justin was left having to try and recall events and conversations he wasn’t asked about at the time,’ says his solicitor Annalisa Moscardini. ‘How can the outcome of a murder trial hang on evidence of this nature? We were hamstrung from the start?’

Plummer was reconvicted – the prosecution relying heavily on the testimony of a now dead prisoner not heard in the original trial who claimed he had confessed to the murder when they shared a cell. His legal team is now given leave to appeal on the basis of concerns about the safety of the evidence. His lawyers argue that the prisoner was a police informant with a history of schizophrenia whose testimony was self-evidently flawed.

Justin Plummer has never applied for parole because (as he explains) that would require him addressing his ‘offending behaviour’. ‘And I ain’t going to do that, am I? There’s only one of two ways I’m going to leave jail – dead or an innocent man.’

‘When I speak to Justin, I see a man greatly damaged by the system. This is a system he has been in, in the highest of security categories, for 26 years. Resolutely refusing to apply for parole because he wanted to be released as an innocent man, acting to his own detriment. Sleeping on the floor.’
Justin Plummer’s solicitor Annalisa Moscardini

The hearing starts in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday next week. Follow for updates on the Justice Gap