Judges deciding the fate of wrongly convicted man Oliver Campbell dismissed the fact that his co-defendant had spent years telling people he was innocent of the crime.

Appeal judges were played an audio recording in March of self-confessed robber Eric Samuels telling a BBC reporter that Oliver Campbell had been wrongly convicted of another man’s murder.

It was at least the fourth time over a period of more than ten years that Samuels, who admitted his own part in the crime, had blown the whistle on what judges ruled today was Mr Campbell's wrongful conviction.

Mr Campbell, who suffered severe brain damage as a baby and has a mental age of seven, was convicted in 1991 of shooting shopkeeper Baldev Hoondle in a botched robbery.

He was linked to the crime by a distinctive baseball cap found at the scene. Then an eyewitness picked him from a line-up as the shooter, despite having earlier rejected Mr Campbell as a suspect in an ID parade.

No forensic evidence ever linked Mr Campbell to the crime and hairs found inside the baseball cap were ruled by investigators to not match his.

However, he confessed to police - but later recanted. The Court of Appeal heard expert evidence in March that Mr Campbell’s mental impairments meant he was at high risk of falsely confessing.

Jurors at his trial were told about his confessions, but not told that Samuels had already told police that their murder suspect was an innocent man.

His statements were kept out of court by a judge who ruled them "hearsay".

He had told police that he and a man called Harvey had stolen Mr Campbell’s hat in Leicester Square hours before the bungled robbery at G and H Supermarket in Lower Clapton Road, hence its discovery at the murder scene.

“I was going to tell you before but the solicitor told me not to,” Samuels said as he smoked a cigarette in the back of a police car. “Oliver wasn’t there… it was someone else.”

He called Harvey “a crazy man”, telling police: “He shot him. Not me… this isn’t the first time he’s shot someone.”

But Samuels – who has since died – refused to repeat his comments in any formal interview, statement or court testimony.

“By not giving evidence, Eric effectively prevented the jury from hearing the very evidence that might have exonerated Oliver,” Michael Birnbaum KC told the Court of Appeal in March.

“As you know, such a thing would not happen today.”

Samuels later repeated his exonerating statements to at least three other people, including a reporter for BBC’s Rough Justice.

“Olly wasn’t there,” he told the BBC. “It’s not even nothing to do with him.”

Mr Birnbaum told the Hackney Gazette after the appeal hearing that he believed Samuels’s statements were the most powerful evidence of Mr Campbell’s innocence.

“It’s a difficult one to get over, I think,” he said.

But the Court of Appeal judges dismissed it as a ground of appeal.

“We accept that the evidence of Samuels’s exonerations of the appellant could now be ruled admissible,” they wrote.

But they added: “Even if it was, it could in our view carry very little weight and it cannot afford, or even contribute to, a ground of appeal.”

Government prosecutor John Price had urged the judges to uphold the conviction and ignore Samuels's statements. 

He said they had been correctly deemed "hearsay" and that Samuels was a "hopelessly inconsistent" witness anyway. 

“They’ve dismissed everything,” said Glyn Maddocks KC, who has worked on Mr Campbell’s case for 25 years.

“They haven’t really engaged. I’m not sure that’s particularly balanced or fair but that’s for others to decide. The Court of Appeal seems to be raising the bar higher and higher for themselves.”

The judges did quash Mr Campbell’s conviction and order that he will not have to face a retrial, but only did so on what they called the “narrow” ground that scientific advances had shed more light on the risk that his confessions had been false.