A fourteenth person jailed by corrupt and racist police officer, Derek Ridgewell, has had their case referred back to the Court of Appeal by the miscarriages of justice watchdog.
In April 1976, Christopher Poulter was convicted of the theft of 13 mailbags and their contents at Inner London Crown Court, alongside his co-defendants Stephen Simmons and Kevin Biggs. He was, at the time, 22 years old. He wasgiven a 12-month prison sentence. Then a British Transport Police Officer, DS Ridgewell testified that he had caught the men stealing from the Clapham Goods Yard.
Ridgewell has since become notorious for fitting up mostly young black men for theft, concealing his own criminality. He finally went to prison for the theft of over £1m worth of goods in the course of his work as a BTP officer, but died two years later, in 1982. The wrongful convictions that resulted from his corruption have been overturned in a slow trickle, with the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), British Transport Police, and Ministry of Justice struggling to get to grip with the scale of Ridgwell’s wrongdoing. The final convictions of members of the so-called ‘Stockwell Six’ were overturned at the court of appeal in July 2025 almost half a century after they were framed.
Poulter applied to the CCRC late last year, telling the body that he and his co-defendants had been in a pub in Tooting all evening and were later approached by police officers who asked them what they had been doing that night and arrested them. All three men made admissions to the offences but did not sign their interview records as being correct.
In a statement released today the CCRC said Poulter did not apply to overturn his conviction sooner because he received legal advice that said he wasn’t eligible to do so. He applied to the watchdog after being spoken to by British Transport Police as a result of its own live investigation into DS Ridgewell’s misconduct, during which they are seeking further potential victims of his crimes.
His case will now be heard at the Court of Appeal, and his name may finally be cleared.
CCRC Chair Dame Vera Baird KC said: ‘This is the 14th case that the CCRC has sent back to the courts where the credibility of DS Ridgewell was central to the prosecution. If there are any other people who were convicted through police work by Ridgwell, we stand ready to investigate whether we can refer your case to the court of appeal too.’
In 2024 the British Transport Police released a report into the actions of Derek Ridgewell, which was criticised at the time for running to only nine pages and being ‘flawed’ in its inability to grapple with the impacts of records that had been lost or destroyed. Matt Foot, Director of the legal charity APPEAL, said BTP’s probe went ‘nowhere near enough’, and accused the force of not examining all the available internal records that would uncover the full extent of the scandal.
