A man who spent 28 years in prison after being wrongly convicted twice features in a new series on miscarriages of justice. Justin Plummer, whose case first featured on the Justice Gap, has done his first television interview with actor and Will Mellor for new series Convictions Gone Bad on Crime+Investigation.

As reported on the Justice Gap, Justin Plummer received just 15 minutes’ notice that he was about to be a free man last summer after more than a quarter of a century behind bars for an horrific murder that he always insisted had nothing to do with him.  He had previously had his conviction overturned in 2021 for the killing of  38-year-old Janice Cartwright-Gilbert in 1998. The Court of Appeal held that the forensic technique, described as ‘pioneering’ at the time, was ‘neither validated nor suitable… either in the late 1990s or today’. However, Lord Justice Fulford insisted on a retrial – and so Plummer was not released – despite more than a quarter of a century passing since his first conviction and, his lawyers arguing, the loss of key evidence by Bedford Police including the victim’s clothing.

Plummer was convicted a second time in 2023 after a 33-day trial – significantly longer than his two-week original trial. An entirely new prosecution case was argued a quarter of a century later drawing on another very controversial form of evidence, a cell confession. It was argued that Plummer admitted to the murder to his cellmate. The dangers of such evidence are well known – and Plummer’s cell mate appeared to have been an especially unreliable source: a police informant, diagnosed with schizophrenia who died in 1999. Plummer’s (re)conviction was overturned last year. Justin Plummer has always protested his innocence – and claims to have spent 28 years sleep on the floor of his cell in protest.

• You can read more about Justin Plummer on the Justice Gap here
• For a long read on Justin’s case, read PROOF issue 7 here
• You can also here Justin’s story on our podcast The Overturn
• Episode one of Convictions Gone Bad on the Angela Cannings case was aired this week. Other episodes feature Andrew Malkinson, Sam Hallam and Kevin Richardson of the Central Park Five

Justin Plummer told Will Mellor how he felt when he heard that he would have to face a retrial. ‘Dead inside, completely wounded,’ he said. ‘I’d just been through the trial once and then they were coming at me again, do they want as many bites of the apple as they can get? I don’t think that was justice.’

Mellor spoke to the Mirror about the TV interview. ‘My heart broke for him,’ he said. ‘I wanted to give him a hug. How do you fix 28 years of somebody’s life you’ve wrongly taken away? Justin didn’t get to go to his parents’ funerals.’

‘Before I sat down with him, we thought he may not even turn up,’ Mellor said. ‘He’s so nervous about who he can trust. We really wanted to sit down with him because I thought it was important that we got the words directly from him. Not just what I feel about it, but how he feels. But we didn’t want to force the issue because he’s been through enough, so we just let him talk.’

‘I couldn’t believe he’d slept on the floor of his cell for 28 years in protest against his imprisonment,’ Mellor said. ‘I said, ‘Was there ever a point where you just thought, I’ll just tell them I’ve done it, and I’ll get out? Because they say if you plead guilty, you’re free’. He spent an extra eight years in prison because he refused to say he was.’

‘In some of the cases we cover in this series, their mistake means a murderer and a rapist remained on the streets while innocent men were behind bars. That is so wrong,’ Mellor told the Mirror. ‘That’s why it’s important that we need justice, not just for Justin but for the rest of these people. I’d like to see Justin helped put back on his feet, and helped back into the community.’

As has been reported on the Justice Gap, there was no proper support put in place for Justin Plummer on his release.

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