Miscarriage of justice victim Sam Hallam injured in police incident just months after release

Sam Hallam and his mother Wendy

A miscarriage of justice victim who spent seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit was wrongly alleged to have assaulted police officers shortly after he was freed.

Sam Hallam, 25, of Stoke Newington, was today found innocent of two counts of assaulting an officer in the execution of his duty.

A court heard Mr Hallam was hit with a “glancing blow” from a police baton and was taken to hospital for treatment for facial injuries after being tripped up by an officer in Bevenden Street, Hoxton.

He was later charged with assaulting officers, but at Stratford Magistrates’ Court today District Judge Connelly said police had not followed up key lines of inquiry that might have established the truth of the matter earlier.

Mr Hallam was at the centre of a highly publicised campaign after he was wrongly convicted of murder in 2005.

The conviction was quashed last year at the Court of Appeal, where judges were told Mr Hallam had been the victim of a “serious miscarriage of justice” attributed to a fatally flawed police investigation.

Earlier this month Paul May, who led the Free Sam Hallam campaign, said that since being released Mr Hallam had received no compensation or help finding work from the authorities.

Mr Hallam is now working for a major high street retail chain, having found a job “under his own efforts,” he added.

Mr May appeared as a character witness for Mr Hallam and said: “Of the wrongly convicted prisoners I have had dealings with – about twenty – Sam was by far and away the most passive and least aggressive.”

Giving evidence Mr Hallam said he had used his mobile phone to try and film an officer said to have been “roughing up” his friend, when he was hit with a “glancing blow” on his back from a police truncheon.

He said he “instinctively” ran after hearing someone shout “Get him” and was then tripped up by a plain clothed police officer.

“I may have been scared. I just ran,” he said, adding: “As soon as I hit the ground it was just an instantaneous black flash.”

Mr Hallam said he remembered “struggling to breathe”, adding: “It felt like there were three or four people standing on my back.”

He was in the dock alongside brother Terence, 33, and Jaki Bell, 26, both of Hoxton.

They too were cleared of assaulting officers.

A fourth defendant, Robert Fitzgerald, 27, of De Beauvoir Town, did not attend court and put forward no case.

He was convicted in his absence of one count of assaulting an officer.

Police officers who gave evidence said they had used force in self-defence after stopping a car the defendants were travelling in in December last year, but they could not confidently attribute violent actions to any one individual.

Terrence Hallam admitted to swearing at officers, adding: “I did say something along the lines of they put my brother away for eight years for something he did not do.”

He also admitted rugby-tackling plain clothed officers who tripped up his brother and tried to detain him but said he believed they were civilians at the time.

He said: “I was just worried for my little brother I suppose. I saw them trip him up and I saw how his head bounced off the floor so I just obviously was worried about him.”

One of the officers then sprayed CS gas in Terence Hallam’s face, causing him burns, but the officer did not subsequently follow regulations which state this use of force must be reported to more senior officers.

Mr Bell was also injured during the incident when he was hit on the collarbone with a baton.

In his summing up defence counsel Mr Srikantharajah Nereshraaj said: “I’m not for one moment suggesting these officers have deliberately lied or that they have fabricated this incident.”

But he said they had “misperceived, misinterpreted and misremembered”.

Helen Butcher, defense counsel for Terence Hallam, described the evidence for the prosecution as “weak, vague and inconsistent”.

The investigating officer in the case, PC Tiffany Lockiby, was criticised by District Judge Connelly for producing no notes about her attempts to find CCTV footage or potential evidence from Sam Hallam’s phone that the judge said “might have been useful”.

DJ Connelly added: “It is a disappointment that we have arrived where we have in this case.”

The court also heard PC Lockiby was not trained to examine Mr Hallam’s phone to see if there was footage on it that could potentially have helped clarify what happened.