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O’Connell, Terrence

Published:

Terrence O’Connell and his co-defendants, Thomas Kingston and Thomas Reynolds, were tried together at the Central Criminal Court on 4th August 2000. All three pleaded not guilty.

Messrs Kingston and Reynolds were convicted of conspiracy to supply a Class B controlled drug (amphetamine) and were sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment. Mr O’Connell was convicted of doing an act tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

At the time of the offences for which they were convicted, all three men were police officers serving with the South East Regional Crime Squad (SERCS) of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS).

In July 1998, a convicted drug dealer provided information to police alleging that officers serving in SERCS were corrupt. As a result, the anti-corruption arm of the Complaints Investigation Branch set up “Operation Russia” in order to investigate the allegations.

The convictions of the three defendants in this case depended in large part on the evidence of another officer who also served in SERCS. This officer pleaded guilty to various charges and became a “resident informant”.

In April 2001, the defendants’ appeals against conviction were heard jointly with those of two other former SERCS officers, Robert Clark and Christopher Drury. All the appeals were dismissed. Messrs Kingston, Reynolds and O’Connell applied to the Commission for a review of their convictions in March 2011.

During review, the CCRC obtained new evidence which related to post-trial allegations made by this informant, the nature and circumstances of which raised substantial doubts as regards his credibility and reliability as a witness generally and, more specifically, as regards the credibility and reliability of the evidence he gave at trial.

The CCRC concluded that there was a real possibility the Court of Appeal would find that the informant had been discredited as a witness of truth and that his trial evidence could no longer be relied upon, making the convictions of the defendants unsafe, especially given the centrality of the informant’s evidence to the prosecution’s case at trial.

The CCRC referred the conviction in May 2013.

The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in July 2014.