A man who was twice convicted of murder has had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal – again. The Court of Appeal found Justin Plummer’s conviction for the murder of Janice Cartwright-Gilbert unsafe because hearsay evidence from another prisoner should have been withdrawn from the jury.
The judgment in Justin Plummer v R said the trial judge ‘did not consider after the close of the prosecution case whether the evidence was so unconvincing that [Plummer]’s conviction would be unsafe as required by section 125 of the 2003 [Criminal Justice Act], and was not asked to do so’.
Plummer was first convicted of the murder in December 1988 following a trial at St Albans Crown Court. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years. On a second application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, his case was referred to the Court of Appeal in February 2021. His conviction was subsequently quashed and directions were given for a retrial.
Following the retrial at Aylesbury Crown Court, Plummer was convicted of murder in 2023 and again sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years. An appeal against conviction was made to the Court of Appeal, this time without the CCRC's involvement.
The prosecution case was based on an alleged confession Plummer was said to have made to a fellow prisoner in 1997 while on remand for other offences. The witness statement of the other prisoner, who died in 1999, was read to the jury by leave of the judge who ruled it was ‘admissible as hearsay evidence, applying section 121 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003’.
Referring to the judge’s approach on admissibility, Lord Justice Edis, in lead judgment, Mrs Justice McGowan and His Honour Judge Lickley KC, sitting as a judge of the Court of Appeal criminal division, said the trial judge delivered an ‘exemplary ruling’ on the application to admit the other prisoner’s evidence as hearsay evidence.
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Having admitted the hearsay evidence, the judge ‘did not carry out the required assessment in section 125’, the judgment said, adding that if he had he would have ‘been driven to the conclusion that the confession was the decisive evidence on which the prosecution could rely in order to prove its case’.
It said: ‘We have not heard argument directed to the sufficiency of the other evidence, but it is clear that in its absence there was no evidence on which the jury could convict, or, at least, that such other evidence as there was, was tenuous and weak.'
The CoA found the case ‘should have been stopped’ under section 125 of the 2003 act at the conclusion of the evidence and the ‘judge’s failure to do that clearly…renders the conviction unsafe’. The appeal judges did ‘not criticise the judge for failing to address this question’ as he was not asked to do so and it was only after the trial that R v BOB [2024] ‘construed section 125 as placing a duty on the court to determine the questions raised in section 125 in such a case, even if no party raises the question’.
Quashing Plummer’s conviction, the CoA said the conviction was unsafe because the other prisoner’s hearsay evidence ‘should have been withdrawn from the jury even if, which we have not decided, it was properly admitted in the first place’.Ayles
