The miscarriage of justice watchdog has referred the conviction of the final member of the ‘Stockwell Six’ more than than 50 years after being convicted.  Ronald De Souza was convicted on 22 September 1972 and received a sentence of six months’ detention for attempted robbery following an operation by the since disgraced police officer DS Derek Ridgewell.

• You can read about the Stockwell Six and Ridgewell’s legacy on the Justice Gap here including this account by Winston Trew, wrongly convicted as one of the Oval Four (here). You can hear an interview with Winston on the Justice Gap podcast

Ronald De Souza was one of a group of young black men arrested by DS Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police anti-mugging squad after boarding a train at Stockwell Underground station on 18 February 1972. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has investigated the historical racist and corrupt practices of DS Ridgewell, who fabricated evidence that led to convictions that lasted long after his death in 1982.

De Souza’s solicitor Jenny Wiltshire, of Hickman & Rose, said: ‘While it is good news that the CCRC has referred Mr De Souza’s conviction to the Court of Appeal, it is a tragedy that is has taken over fifty years for the miscarriage of justice he suffered to start to be rectified.’

Wiltshire continued: ‘Derek Ridgewell, the corrupt police officer at the heart of this case and others like it, was convicted in 1980. It was at that point that Ridgewell’s employer,  British Transport Police, should have immediately reviewed every criminal investigation in which he was involved. But it didn’t. As a result it has taken half a century for the individual people victimised by him to come forward and fight to clear their names. Nor was DS Ridgewell’s corruption confined to only the Stockwell Six and Oval Four cases. Indeed, I am not confident that all his victims have yet been identified.’

The CCRC began its review of the Stockwell Six cases after it referred two other cases involving DS Ridgewell: Stephen Simmons and the Oval Four. The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions in both of these cases.

Following CCRC referrals, the convictions of Mr De Souza’s co-defendants – Paul Green, Courtney Harriott, Cleveland Davison and Texo Johnson – were overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021 (here). Everet Mullins, the sixth co-defendant, was found not guilty at trial.  The convictions were overturned on the basis of new information rendering the evidence of DS Ridgewell and his colleagues unreliable.  The CCRC had previously appealed for Mr De Souza to come forward and an application was received in December 2024.

The CCRC says that the Court of Appeal was ‘likely to take the same approach’ to De Souza’s conviction as to Texo Johnson as his case was ‘materially indistinguishable’ .