PUBLISHER'S NOTE: What do police informants have to do with forensic science? (I'm glad you asked). Investigative Reporter Pamela Colloff give us a clue when she writes - at the link below - "I’ve wanted to write about jailhouse informants for a long time because they often appear in troubled cases in which the other evidence is weak." That's my experience as will as a criminal lawyer and an observer of criminal justice. Given the reality that jurors - thanks to the CSI effect - are becoming more and more insistent on the need for there to be forensic evidence, it is becoming more and more common for police to rely on shady tactics such as use of police snitches, staging lineups, coercing, inducing, or creating false confessions out of thin air, procuring false eyewitness testimony or concealing exculpatory evidence.
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "At the original trial, the CPS relied upon an expert witness by the name of David Lewin, a dentist who swapped fillings for “forensic odontology” and a career in the courts giving evidence on bitemarks. The trial judge summed up his evidence: “It was one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.” Lewin had assured the court that there was no difference between matching bitemarks and shoe prints. Despite having no experience in the latter, he claimed to have developed a new technique using imaging software to scan prints and transfer the results onto transparent film. Lewin’s wife, Persephone, recorded her husband’s eureka moment in the book she wrote about his career, Bite to Byte: The story of injury analysis. “Computer-generated overlays were central to the trial,” she explained. “The case hinged on damaged flaws in the sole of a trainer shoe matched to imprints of those same flaws on the victim’s face, which bore the pattern of multiple stamping. This new mode of presenting evidence was written up in the national press as ‘groundbreaking forensic work’ and commended by the judge.” Lord Justice Fulford did not agree. Instead, he ruled that Lewin’s technique was “neither validated nor suitable… either in the late 1990s or today”.
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Instead of the discredited forensic evidence, the prosecution in the retrial leaned heavily on a “cell confession”. A now-dead prisoner, Christopher Dunne, claimed shortly after the murder that Justin Plummer admitted to killing the woman. Dunne’s hearsay evidence was identified by Lord Justice Fulford in 2021 as sufficiently “credible” to help justify the controversial retrial."
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COMMENTARY: "The dangers of cell confessions," by Jon Robins, published by 'Unherd,' on July 11, 2025.
“There’s only one of two ways I’m going to leave jail — dead or as an innocent man.” Justin Plummer, who has spent more than half his life in prison, is only there because he insists that he is an innocent man. If he admitted to the killing, he could have been out years ago. He’s never applied for parole because that would require him to address his “offending behaviour”. Instead, for 26 years, he’s been challenging a conviction for a murder he maintains had nothing to do with him. He refuses his cell bed in HMP Belmarsh and instead sleeps on the floor in protest.
For the past four weeks, I’ve spoken with the 54-year-old prisoner every week. We talk for 10 minutes before the pips go — all calls cut out at that point — and then he has to ring back. Sometimes I am available, sometimes not. It is a frustrating process.
Justin Plummer has no one left on the outside. His mother, father and sister have all died since he was sent down; he is estranged from what remains of his family. He lost touch with his teenage friends years ago.
But in one respect, he is a lucky man. Despite a 20-year-plus freeze on legal aid rates and the extreme odds against successfully challenging a criminal conviction, his legal team continue to fight his corner. They are convinced his conviction is unsafe and they argue nothing remains of the original prosecution case. His solicitor acts pro bono.
The first time Justin Plummer rang me was after a successful appeal in July 2021, which he hoped would be his first step to freedom. To the surprise of his lawyers, the CPS pushed for a re-trial. To their even greater surprise, he was reconvicted in June 2023 after 33 days in court and sentenced to life with a minimum term of 16 years.
In October last year, three judges gave him leave permission to bring an appeal — again. Lord Justice Edis said that this was “an extraordinary case” and called his challenge “arguable”. “All we have decided is that your appeal is arguable,” Edis said. “That does not mean it will succeed. You need to have appropriate expectations about what might happen.”
Next week, Plummer has a final chance to persuade the court that he was wrongly convicted. He has few expectations. “The justice system is just a complete mess,” he says. “It’s just not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”
***
The attack on Janice Cartwright-Gilbert on 27 February 1997 was deranged. The 38-year-old woman had been living in a mobile home with her partner while their house was being built. They lived on a remote country lane outside Wilden, a small village close to Bedford. Her body was found in a burning caravan with multiple stab wounds, a knife and scissors sticking out of her neck, having been throttled by an electric flex.
Justin Plummer is the first to admit that he was a complete menace around the small Bedfordshire village where he lived. He was on a robbing spree at the time of the killing, clocking up 24 convictions for theft and burglary in the four months up to the murder. He broke into a house just five miles away, two days before the murder.
But is there anything in a long list of previous convictions to suggest he was capable of such a psychotic attack? His criminal record has one conviction for violence — poking a police officer in the eye as he was trying to do a runner. There is another incident: an attack on his ex-girlfriend, two years before the murder. The prosecution, telling the jury at his 2023 retrial that it was “very similar”, alleged that Plummer “punched her in the face, twice” and kicked her as she lay on the floor “at least two or three times”. Eight days after the fight, she went to her GP, who noted: “No bruising, a tender area just above the left ear” and sore ribs. She left with a prescription for painkillers and was sent off for an X-ray. It is not known whether she went. Justin Plummer says that his ex-girlfriend was a heroin addict who went to the GP to get medication and exaggerated her symptoms.
He admits that he hit his ex, but claims it was “a minor domestic” which has been deliberately distorted by the prosecution. On his account, he reacted badly under extreme provocation. His ex, who is also the mother of his child, at the time was in a relationship with his brother. I attempt to speak to her via her son — he does not respond.
Nearly all of Plummer’s previous convictions related to his activities as a prolific burglar. He had a clear modus operandi — “nick stuff and leg it”. He was, as his barrister put it at his recent appeal, “like one of those seagulls on the beach” who would “swoop in and steal anything”.
It was not obvious that Janice Cartwright-Gilbert was murdered in the course of a burglary; at the original trial, there was no evidence presented to the jury that anything had been stolen. Nor was there any forensic evidence linking Justin Plummer to the killing. Except a stamp-print on the woman’s head which, the original jury was told, matched his size 6 Nike Air Screech trainers.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his conviction to the Court of Appeal in February 2021 on the basis that the sole forensic evidence linking Plummer to the murder was “fundamentally flawed”. In July that year, the Appeal judges agreed. Lord Justice Fulford ruled that there was “no evidence” to suggest that it had to be Plummer’s trainer.
Five months after the murder, the Bedfordshire on Sunday ran an article headlined “Footprint of a murderer” claiming to show “the mark left by a Nike trainer at the murder scene”. It reported how “pioneering forensic techniques” demonstrated that the print could only have come from a particular pair of Nikes. Bedford police sent two detectives to Portland, Oregon to find out how many pairs had been imported into the UK. “We have over 400 different types of trainers and I guess it would be possible to find out how many of each type would be sold in each area,” a Nike spokesman told the paper.
At the original trial, the CPS relied upon an expert witness by the name of David Lewin, a dentist who swapped fillings for “forensic odontology” and a career in the courts giving evidence on bitemarks. The trial judge summed up his evidence: “It was one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.”
Lewin had assured the court that there was no difference between matching bitemarks and shoe prints. Despite having no experience in the latter, he claimed to have developed a new technique using imaging software to scan prints and transfer the results onto transparent film.
Lewin’s wife, Persephone, recorded her husband’s eureka moment in the book she wrote about his career, Bite to Byte: The story of injury analysis. “Computer-generated overlays were central to the trial,” she explained. “The case hinged on damaged flaws in the sole of a trainer shoe matched to imprints of those same flaws on the victim’s face, which bore the pattern of multiple stamping. This new mode of presenting evidence was written up in the national press as ‘groundbreaking forensic work’ and commended by the judge.”
Lord Justice Fulford did not agree. Instead, he ruled that Lewin’s technique was “neither validated nor suitable… either in the late 1990s or today”. The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction, but Fulford insisted on a retrial — despite more than a quarter of a century passing since his first conviction and (as his lawyers argued) the loss of key evidence by Bedford Police, including the victim’s clothing. “Justin was left having to try and recall events and conversations he wasn’t asked about at the time,” says solicitor Annalisa Moscardini. “How can the outcome of a murder trial hang on evidence of this nature? We were hamstrung from the start?”
In the April 2023 retrial, the strength of the forensic evidence was significantly downgraded. Far from it being the slam dunk Lewin claimed, it was agreed that there was a “moderately strong support” that it might have been Plummer’s trainer.
However, his lawyers argued that far more persuasive was the evidence of two new experts who had cut deep into the trainer fabric and demonstrated that there was no blood on the trainer or in its fabric.
The prosecution stated that Plummer had repeatedly stamped on the woman’s head and then trailed through the bloodied surroundings. It was argued that even if the trainers had been put through a washing machine cycle, there would be blood in the cotton stitching of the shoes. The lawyers pointed out that there was no evidence that Justin Plummer made any attempt to clean his Nikes.
Instead of the discredited forensic evidence, the prosecution in the retrial leaned heavily on a “cell confession”. A now-dead prisoner, Christopher Dunne, claimed shortly after the murder that Justin Plummer admitted to killing the woman. Dunne’s hearsay evidence was identified by Lord Justice Fulford in 2021 as sufficiently “credible” to help justify the controversial retrial.
But if Dunne’s evidence was so compelling, why hadn’t it been used in the original trial (when he was alive)? Presumably, it was because he was a police informant and a schizophrenic. He contacted the police to report Plummer’s confession on the day the Bedfordshire on Sunday ran its “Footprint of a murderer” story. Could Dunne have read the article and decided to contact the police? It so happened that one of the two police officers who flew off to the US, named in the article as DC Sue Brannigan, was his handler.
Dunne claimed in his statement to have concocted a story about a drugs raid with the deliberate intention of mentioning “Brannigan” so as to prompt Plummer’s memory. On Dunne’s account, when he mentioned the name, Plummer’s face “went white” and became “very agitated” before confessing.
Plummer’s lawyers say this was a self-evident lie. Dunne could not have known “Brannigan” was involved when these conversations with Plummer were supposed to have happened — the officer had little involvement with the Plummer case beyond her Portland jolly. Two days prior to making his statement, Brannigan paid money into Dunne’s account — the police insist that the payment had nothing to do with Plummer.
The Court of Appeal will now reexamine the strength of a dead man’s testimony. “This is a classic example of the dangers of cell confession evidence,” says his solicitor Annalisa Moscardini. “Justin has been so badly served by the justice system for 26 years — he was convicted in 1998 on the basis of really bogus science. The prosecution accepted that it was so bogus that when we got the case back to the Court of Appeal they threw their hand in. Now he’s been convicted on the statement of a convicted criminal in the pay of the police. He died in 1999. The evidence we have is his written statement and we couldn’t question or challenge him — yet that written evidence has now been resurrected and used to convict him. It compounds the injustice that Justin Plummer originally suffered.”
“When I speak to Justin, I see a man greatly damaged by the system,” Moscardini adds. “This is a system he has been in, in the highest of security categories, for 26 years. Resolutely refusing to apply for parole because he wanted to be released as an innocent man, acting to his own detriment. Sleeping on the floor.”
Plummer tells me he has done everything he can to fight a system predicated on offenders coming to terms with their crimes. His first opportunity for parole came up in 2013 — he refused, as he has done on each subsequent opportunity.
Why? “I have not entertained any of that shit,” he tells me. “I have done no courses, nothing. I am not interested in anything other than getting out of jail. I have had so many arguments with screws, governors lecturing me: ‘You’ll never get out alive if you don’t go along with the system.’ I say: ‘I don’t care about your stupid parole courses. I am only interested in one thing, proving my innocence.’”
“I have gone from being 26 years old when I was first convicted to being 50 years old in, like, a click of the fingers. My life has just gone. I mean it has just completely gone.” Tonight, Plummer sleeps on the floor of his cell in protest of a justice system that seems hell bent on keeping him behind bars. Next week he takes his fight back to the courts.""
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-dangers-of-cell-confessions/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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