Mr Booker served a 21-month prison sentence before his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2006.<\/p>\n
He would tell the Sheffield Star afterwards how his “world fell to pieces” upon going to jail, where he shared a cell with an armed robber. <\/p>\n
Abigail Rolling, who was Mr Booker’s defence solicitor during the case, describes her client as the “quintessential Good Samaritan”. <\/p>\n
“It’s not just an innocent man being convicted of something they hadn’t done,” she says. <\/p>\n
“It’s someone who went to help a stranger.”<\/p>\n
Ms Rolling, who describes Mr Booker’s conviction as the “lowest point” in her professional life, says the defendant and victim “were strangers”. <\/p>\n
“There was no evidence their paths ever crossed that night,” she explains. <\/p>\n
“There was no motive for an assault. No witnesses. No CCTV.”<\/p>\n
In a bizarre twist, however, a panel of three judges ruled it was “not in the public interest” to disclose why they were now so certain he was not the killer. <\/p>\n
The previous year, the CPS had written to his defence counsel, effectively encouraging them to appeal the guilty verdict. It’s a move Ms Rolling describes as “unprecedented” in the legal world, as in almost all appeal cases the burden is on the defence to gather new evidence that might overturn a verdict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mr Booker served a 21-month prison sentence before his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-342660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}