The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred its fifteenth case of possible historical wrongful conviction to the Court of Appeal related to investigations conducted by convicted police officer Derek Ridgewell.
This case refers to an incident in June 1975 where a man named Kevin Biggs, along with two co-defendants Stephen Simmons and Christopher Poulter, were charged with theft. They were convicted and found guilty of stealing 13 mailbags in April 1976.
At the time, the prosecution made the case that the three individuals were spotted by British Transport Police, including Ridgewell, at the Clapham Goods Yards during the early morning of 4 June. They claimed that the men were found taking mailbags and fled by car. The defendants were pursued by police and arrested. The police stated that all three of the men confessed during interviews, but none of them signed their interview records to verify them as correct.
The defence claimed that Biggs and his friends were in a pub when the police came up to them and asked them what they had done earlier that night before arresting them. They also claimed that there was no corroborating evidence to support the crime. Despite this, the Inner London Crown Court found Biggs guilty and sentenced him to borstal training.
Derek Ridgwell was himself convicted of similar theft offences in 1980 and was found to have consistently falsely accused young men of robbery. Since 2013, the CCRC have been reviewing potential wrongful convictions resulting from arrests involving Ridgewell.
The conviction of Biggs’ co-defendant, Stephen Simmons, was the first conviction to be referred by the CCRC to the Court of Appeal as part of the Ridgewell investigation and was successfully quashed in January 2018. Christopher Poulter’s case was recently the fourteenth reference and is awaiting a hearing from the Court of Appeal. To date, thirteen convictions have been overturned and those include landmark convictions such as ‘the Oval Four’ and the ‘Stockwell Six’.
Chair of the CCRC, Dame Vera Baird KC said that the Commission also ‘stand ready to investigate’ any other cases of convictions related to Ridgwell.
