Stephen Simmons was twenty years old when a judge at Inner London Crown Court sent him to borstal for stealing mailbags from a railway wagon. He had not done it. He said so at the time, nobody believed him, and he served the sentence. Then he went home, got on with his life, and carried the conviction for the next thirty-seven years.
In 2013 he rang a legal phone-in show on London radio to ask whether there was anything that could be done about a wrongful conviction from the 1970s. It was not a legal strategy. It was a man in his late fifties asking a stranger on the air whether the thing that had been bothering him for four decades was fixable.
What came out of that call was the beginning of the unravelling of one of the longest-running police corruption cases in British legal history. Simmons applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body that investigates possible miscarriages of justice, later that year. Four years after that, the Commission referred his case to the Court of Appeal. His conviction was quashed in January 2018, forty-two years after it was handed down.
And then, last month, the Court of Appeal quashed two more convictions from exactly the same case. Christopher Poulter and Kevin Biggs were the two young men who stood in the dock beside Simmons in 1976. Poulter was twenty-one and went to prison for a year. Biggs was eighteen and was sent to borstal, as Simmons was. The three of them were convicted of stealing thirteen mailbags and their contents from a wagon at Clapham goods yard in south London.
The officer who built the case against all three of them was Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police. Four years after their trial, Ridgewell was himself jailed for seven years for conspiring to steal goods in transit. The haul was valued at more than a million pounds at the time, which at the exchange rates of the day was well over two million dollars. He died in prison two years into the sentence.
Poulter and Biggs are the fourteenth and fifteenth people whose convictions have been overturned because Ridgewell was involved in them. Nobody can say with confidence that they are the last.
The thing worth understanding about Ridgewell is that he was not a bad officer who made mistakes. The documented record, established across multiple Court of Appeal judgments rather than in journalism, is that he fabricated confessions and planted evidence, and that he did it repeatedly over years while wearing a warrant card. In 1972 he was running what was then called an anti-mugging squad on the London Underground. The Criminal Cases Review Commission’s own account of his record states that he framed innocent people, and particularly young black men, for his own criminality. That is a statement about Ridgewell’s pattern of conduct, and it is a documented one. It is not a statement about Poulter, Biggs or Simmons specifically, and neither the Commission’s statement on their case nor the reporting of the judgment establishes anything about the ethnicity of those three men. The distinction matters, and it is the court record rather than inference that should be allowed to do the work.
The pattern, where the courts have established it, looks like this. In February 1972, six young men were arrested at Stockwell station and accused of attempted robbery. They became known as the Stockwell Six: Ronald De Souza, Paul Green, Courtney Harriot, Cleveland Davidson, Texo Johnson and Everet Mullins. Five of them were convicted. Their appeals were refused at the time. All five of those convictions have since been quashed, the last of them only last year, after the Commission put out a public appeal to trace De Souza because it could not find him and got a result in the final weeks of 2024.
A month after the Stockwell arrests, four men aged between nineteen and twenty-three were arrested at Oval station and accused of stealing passengers’ handbags. Winston Trew, Stirling Christie, George Griffiths and Constantine Boucher, all of Jamaican origin, were convicted at the Old Bailey in November 1972 of assaulting a police officer and attempted theft. They became the Oval Four. Every one of those convictions has been overturned. Trew spent decades writing and campaigning about what happened to him, and his work is part of the reason the pattern is now a matter of judicial finding rather than a grievance.
Then there is the Bricklayers Arms depot case, which went to trial at the Central Criminal Court in 1977. British Rail employees were accused of conspiring to steal by re-labelling parcels. Eight people were convicted. The convictions of Saliah Mehmet and Basil Peterkin were overturned a couple of years ago, both of them posthumously. Errol Campbell’s conviction was quashed last year, also after his death.
That is the company Poulter and Biggs now keep: a long list of people, most of them very young at the time, whose lives were rearranged by the word of one detective sergeant, and a shorter list of people who lived long enough to see it undone.
Poulter did not live long enough to see it comfortably, but he did live. Biggs did not. He died in 2004, and the application that led to his conviction being quashed was made on his behalf earlier this year, twenty-two years after his death. The Justice Gap, which covers this area of law, put it starkly: Kevin Biggs died a convicted criminal. That is the actual cost of the delay, and it cannot be undone by a judgment.
What is almost harder to sit with is that neither man came to the Commission on his own initiative. Poulter applied in November 2025, and he applied because the British Transport Police contacted him. The force that had employed Ridgewell was by then running its own investigation into his misconduct, and in the course of it, it went looking for the people he had put away. Half a century after the trial, Christopher Poulter received a call about a conviction he had presumably stopped expecting anyone to revisit.
Both men, the Commission’s account notes, had previously been advised that they had no grounds to appeal.
Finding them at all was not straightforward. The Commission has described working through ancestry websites, National Archives records and coroners’ reports to trace Ridgewell’s defendants and their families, which is genealogical research rather than legal research, and which tells you something about how cold a fifty-year-old case goes. People move, change names, emigrate and die. Some of them never told their children.
The grounds for referring Poulter’s case were not complicated, and that is part of what is uncomfortable about it. The Commission cited three things: that Ridgewell was convicted of dishonesty offences in 1980; that his credibility was central to the prosecution case against Poulter; and that the Court of Appeal had already quashed the conviction of Poulter’s co-defendant Stephen Simmons on the basis of evidence about Ridgewell. In other words, the argument that freed Poulter and Biggs in 2026 is substantially the argument that freed Simmons in 2018, applied to the two men who had been standing next to him.
The Court of Appeal noted as much. At the hearing last month, which was before Lord Justice Edis, Mr Justice Lavender and Mr Justice Linden, the court observed that at the time of Simmons’s appeal it had not been possible to trace any relatives of Mr Biggs or to find Mr Poulter so that they could be joined to it. The reason these are two separate judgments eight years apart is not that the law changed or that new evidence emerged. It is that in 2018 nobody knew where these two men were.
Lord Justice Edis allowed both appeals and quashed both convictions. The whole thing, after fifty years, took the form of a short ruling in a courtroom neither man was in.
The Commission’s chair, Dame Vera Baird, used the announcement to say plainly that anyone who believes they were convicted through Derek Ridgewell’s actions should come forward and apply. That is not a formality. It is a public body stating, in 2026, that it does not know how many more there are.
It is worth pausing on the arithmetic of that. Fifteen convictions referred, fifteen quashed, which is a complete success rate for every case the Commission has taken on. Ridgewell served in the British Transport Police for years and ran a squad whose business was arresting people. The number of cases he touched is very much larger than fifteen. The number of those that were unsafe is unknown and probably unknowable, because the people involved would have to recognise themselves in a news story, believe that a fifty-year-old conviction can be challenged, and then write to a public body about it. Most of them will have done none of those things. Many of them are dead.
It is also worth being clear about what the Commission can and cannot do, because it is often described as though it overturns convictions, and it does not. It investigates, and where it finds what the law calls a real possibility that a conviction is unsafe, it can refer the case to the Court of Appeal. That is the test it applied here, and it is a lower bar than proving innocence, which is deliberate. The Commission’s job is to get a case back in front of judges, not to decide it. Everything after the referral belongs to the court, which is why the gap between a referral in February and a judgment in September is simply the time it takes a listed appeal to be heard.
The sentences themselves need a word of explanation for anyone reading this outside Britain. Borstal was not prison in the adult sense. It was a form of detention for young offenders, typically under twenty-one, built around training and discipline and generally lasting somewhere between six months and two years. It was abolished in the early 1980s, which places these three convictions in a system that no longer exists. Neither that nor the relative shortness of the terms is the point, though. The point is what the conviction did afterwards. A theft conviction recorded against an eighteen or twenty-one year old in the middle of the 1970s followed him into every job application, every reference, every form that asked. Three young men went into that courtroom with ordinary prospects and came out of it with a permanent answer to a question employers were entitled to ask. That is the sentence that ran for fifty years, and no court imposed it.
The most unsettling fact in the whole story is not Ridgewell himself. Corrupt officers exist, and the ones who get caught are a known quantity. The unsettling part is the timing. He was jailed in 1980, which means the system identified him as a thief and a liar within four years of the Clapham trial. His dishonesty was a matter of public record, proven in a criminal court, for thirty-eight years before the first of his victims had a conviction overturned. The information needed to reopen these cases existed in 1980. Nothing was hidden after that point. What was missing was anyone whose job it was to go back and check.
And it took a man ringing a radio station to start it. Simmons did not have evidence or a lawyer or an institution behind him. He had a conviction he knew was wrong and the eventual discovery, decades later, that the officer who secured it had been jailed for a strikingly similar kind of theft two years after he himself went to borstal. That one fact, available to anyone who looked, was enough.
It would be easy to write his persistence as inspiring, and it is not. Forty years of not being believed is not a character-building exercise. He was in his sixties by the time a court agreed with the thing he had been saying since he was twenty, and the eight years after that were spent waiting for two other men to be found so that the same thing could be said about them. One of them had been dead for two decades before anyone started looking.
Neither Poulter nor Biggs has been given anything back. Poulter served his year and Biggs served his borstal term in the middle of the 1970s, and both of them lived whatever working lives a theft conviction allowed them to live. A quashed conviction is a correction to a record, not a restoration. The question of whether compensation follows was not addressed in the Commission’s statement, and the British compensation scheme for wrongful conviction is narrow and frequently refuses applications, so it would be wrong to imply that anything financial is expected.
What there is instead is a number, and the number is fifteen. Fifteen convictions obtained by one detective sergeant, undone one and two at a time across eight years, the most recent of them belonging to a man who died in 2004 and a man who had to be told by the police that he might not be guilty after all. The Commission is still asking the public for help finding the rest, which is the clearest possible statement that the counting is not finished.