Oval Four's Winston Trew was convicted on a majority verdict

Winston Trew, of Crofton Park, was sent to prison after being convicted on a majority verdict – but was proved innocent 47 years later and had his conviction quashed.

He was one of the “Oval Four” – four black men arrested at Oval tube station in March 1972 for supposedly stealing people’s handbags.

But they were in fact framed by a corrupt, racist police officer who himself later died in prison.

Winston and co-defendant Sterling Christie have now been named in a report among dozens of cases where people convicted on majority verdicts later turned out to be innocent.

Mr Trew was a guest speaker at an event to launch the report, published by the charity Appeal, on Wednesday, May 8.

“In my personal opinion, majority verdicts are used to ensure the outcome of criminal trials,” Mr Trew told City Law School, in Islington.

“They want to ensure convictions for all black males coming before the courts and also inflate conviction rates for particular offences.”

Winston Trew addresses the launch event for Appeal's report on majority verdicts as one of its authors, Naima Sakande, looks on (Image: Charles Thomson)

Appeal’s Naima Sakande and Nisha Waller found majority verdicts were introduced in 1967 for “explicit racist and classist” reasons.

When a rule change meant anybody on the electoral roll could serve on a jury, people in power expressed concerns that women, working classes and ethnic minorities were too stupid.

One judge said that “some West Indian bus conductor” shouldn’t be sitting on a fraud jury, and an MP said English “noblemen” should not be tried by “common clay”.

Majority verdicts were introduced as a result.

Appeal is now calling for them to be abolished again.

Mr Trew said their introduction had coincided with other racist movements, like the “mugging scare”.

“What the police and the press did was say that so-called mugging was a crime committed almost exclusively by black men,” he said.

“They said that those convicted should be given deterrent sentences to prevent others from committing similar crimes.”

Naima Sakande and Nisha Waller spent two years researching their report, which calls for the abolition of majority verdicts (Image: Charles Thomson)

The police officer who framed Mr Trew, Derek Ridgewell, was convicted of corruption in 1980 and sentenced to seven years behind bars, but died two years into his sentence.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has since uncovered “a pattern of false evidence, perjury and violence” by Ridgewell and his squad.

They would falsely accuse young, black men of theft, beat them into signing confessions and then lie under oath about how the confessions had been obtained.

“There’s a thing in English law called the presumption of innocence,” said Mr Trew.

“We were beaten by the police to sign confessions that we had committed crimes. In other words, we were denied the presumption of innocence – because when we came to court, the prosecution was able to say to the jury, ‘These men have admitted committing crimes’.”

Mr Trew thought on his feet in the police station and admitted to some crimes when he knew he had an alibi: he had been signing on at the job centre.

“What I did was use one arm of the state against the other arm of the state,” he said.

When a job centre worker testified that it was “impossible” for him to have committed some of the crimes in his confession, he said, “The judge nearly fell off his chair.”

Winston Trew sat with fellow miscarriage of justice victim Andrew Malkinson and Appeal's founder Emily Bolton (Image: Charles Thomson)

But he was still convicted of attempted theft and assaulting police and given a two-year sentence.

The jury convicted him on a majority of 10-2.

“What I remember about the composition of the jury is that it was all male but there were two black men on it,” he said.

“I would like to believe that they were the two dissenters among the 12 but even then, they were a minority on the jury and the majority verdict rule ensured their votes did not count and we were imprisoned.”

“In my experience, and those of many, many other innocent people, majority verdicts have been a harbinger for wrongful convictions and should be scrapped,” he said.

“Had majority verdicts not been in place, I would not have been convicted… and consequently would not have spent 47 years – most of my adult life – trying to clear my name.”

The Ministry of Justice said it was not considering changing the law, despite Appeal’s findings.