THE conviction of a black man who was “fitted up” by a bent copper nearly 50 years ago was finally overturned by senior judges in London today.

Constantine “Omar” Boucher was one of four black men known as the Oval Four, then aged between 19 and 23 arrested at Oval Underground station in 1972 accused of stealing handbags.

Winston Trew, Sterling Christie and George Griffiths had their convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal in December after a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) earlier in 2019.

But Mr Boucher’s conviction was not referred as the CCRC had been temporarily unable to trace him.

The men were originally convicted of attempted theft and assaulting police, and Mr Christie was also found guilty of theft of a handbag. All four were sentenced to two years, later reduced to eight months on appeal.

The arresting police unit was run by Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell, who had previously served in the then South Rhodesian police force and was involved in a number of high-profile and much criticised cases in the early 1970s.

Today Lord Justice Fulford quashed Mr Boucher’s conviction, saying that the safety of the conviction was “fundamentally undermined by the apparent lack of integrity of DS Ridgewell and the team he led.”

Lord Justice Fulford said: “It is clear that Mr Boucher’s conviction is unsafe. It is highly unfortunate that it has taken nearly 50 years to rectify this injustice.”

The hearing was conducted with the judges in the courtroom but with barristers representing Mr Boucher and the prosecution dialling in by phone.

In a statement after the hearing, Mr Boucher’s solicitor Jenny Wiltshire, head of serious and general crime at Hickman & Rose, who also represented Mr Trew and Mr Christie, said: “While it is, of course, happy news that Mr Boucher’s conviction has been quashed, the fact that it has taken so long is very concerning.

“The British Transport Police and the Home Office have known about this officer’s corruption for decades. Yet they have done little to right his wrongs.

“DS Ridgewell was first denounced as corrupt in 1973. He was imprisoned in 1980. The BTP could have re-examined his cases then. But they didn’t.

“They instead left it to his victims to try and work out for themselves exactly how they had been set up and to gather the evidence they needed to prove their innocence.

“In my view, the BTP should now conduct a wholesale review of all this officer’s cases. It seems to me very likely that there may be many other victims of his corruption.”

Ms Wiltshire added: “My client is grateful to the court for agreeing to hold this hearing under difficult circumstances.

“Having spent 48 years unfairly labelled a criminal, he was keen to have this heard as soon as possible. The court clearly agreed and conducted the hearing by telephone.”

Mr Ridgewell was involved in a series of controversial cases in the early 1970s in which young black men were falsely accused of crimes. It led to calls for the home secretary to open an inquiry, culminating in the 1973 acquittals of the Tottenham Court Road Two, two young Jesuits studying at Oxford University.

He was then moved into a department investigating mailbag theft, where he joined up with two criminals with whom he split the profits of stolen mailbags. Mr Ridgewell was eventually caught and jailed for seven years, dying of a heart attack in prison in 1982 at the age of 37.

In January 2018, Stephen Simmons’s 1976 conviction for stealing mailbags was quashed after he discovered that Mr Ridgewell had later been jailed for a similar offence just two years after his own conviction.

Part of the evidence in Mr Simmons’s appeal was Mr Trew’s book Black for a Cause, Not Just Because, which detailed Mr Ridgewell’s long history of “fit-ups.”

At the hearing in December, Judy Khan QC said that Mr Trew, Mr Christie and Mr Griffiths’s case was “perhaps unprecedented” in that it had “already been cited in support of quashing another appellant’s conviction” before their names had been officially cleared.