Basic police checks would have shown Sam Hallam wasn’t at the scene of the crime, but these weren’t carried out until he had spent much of his youth inside. He explains why he is still fighting for justice, years after his release
he first Sam Hallam heard of the crime that would cost him seven years of his life was when two girls approached him in the street. They told him that they knew what had happened – there had been a street brawl two days earlier in east London involving about 40 people and he had attacked a young man who was now dead. Hallam, then 17 and with no criminal convictions, was bewildered.
Eight people stood trial for the murder of Kassahun. The jury at the Old Bailey heard that the attack was an act of revenge by a group of youths, known as the Hoxton Biker Boys because they rode BMX bikes, against another group who lived a mile away in Whitecross. The murder was a tragedy in multiple ways. Kassahun, whose fatal head injuries were caused by a knife or a baseball bat with a screw protruding at one end, was not the target of the attack.
As a 17-year-old in jail, he was small and naive, the perfect target for bullying. “I was a kid, just out of school. No life experience at all. People saw my vulnerability when I got there. That made it worse for me because they preyed on the vulnerable. People take advantage of that, try to get stuff out of you – for example in the canteen. I got beaten up a lot.”
Away from prison, family and friends fought for him, led by the miscarriage of justice campaigner Paul May, whose investigations helped get the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Bridgewater Four overturned. They did all they could to keep the case in the news. When Hallam was moved to Aylesbury prison in Buckinghamshire, they turned up outside the prison in an open-top bus to celebrate his birthday. “That didn’t go down well at the prison.
But it was a struggle. While he was in prison both his grandmothers died. In October 2010, Hallam hit rock bottom when his father, Terry, took his own life aged 56. For Hallam, the timing made the tragedy even worse. The previous day, the Independent had reported that Hallam was likely to be cleared at a second appeal; his father was found with the newspaper cutting in his pocket.
On 16 May 2012, the case finally returned to the court of appeal for a second time. In the morning Hallam’s team, led by Foot and barrister Henry Blaxland QC, argued that the convictions were unsafe. Immediately after lunch, at 2pm, the prosecution announced it would not contest the appeal. Despite having his conviction quashed, he has come to feel that the establishment does not really believe he was innocent. The money would be useful, he says – he lost seven years of income in prison, he’s not in a fit state to work now, he needs money for therapy and he has to support Thierry. But, he says, the compensation is about so much more than money. “For me it’s more an acceptance of the wrongdoing and what they need to put right.
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