British man released from prison due to video misidentification

More than two years after he was implicated in a murder plot case, a young man was released from prison on Wednesday after a British Court of Appeal found that authorities had misidentified him in a video.

The man, Ademola Adedeji, 21, was among 10 young black men from Manchester whom prosecutors accused of conspiring to kill and maim others to avenge the killing of their close friend. Their trial became a lightning rod in the country’s reckoning with race and policing.

“It doesn’t feel real because this happens once in a million,” Adedeji said of his release in a phone interview from his parents’ home on Wednesday.

Mr. Adedeji did not attack anyone. He did not own a weapon or deal in drugs. He assisted the police in their investigations. There was no homicide victim.

However, he was found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent in 2022 and was serving an eight-year sentence.

Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Adedeji as a gangster, and extracted photos and videos from his social media posts as evidence. For example, a photo of him holding a wad of cash to his ear — a popular pose on Instagram — was used as evidence against him.

The case relied on the fact that Mr Adedeji, who was 17 at the time, joined a group chat on Telegram, where he and his teenage friends discussed how to get revenge days after their friend was killed.

Mr Adedeji sent six text messages to the group over the course of about 20 minutes, sharing the postcode of the men he suspected of killing his friend. No one was injured near the address Mr Adedeji shared.

Because he was accused of conspiring with nine other defendants, including some who committed acts of violence, it did not matter that he did not directly kill or harm others.

The conspiracy trial attracted public attention as an example of how Britain’s crackdown on gangs disproportionately targets black youth.

In the absence of a clear legal definition of gang, the term tends to be applied disproportionately to groups of black youth. Legal experts say such a classification helps convince jurors of guilt.

One of the key pieces of evidence was a dark and grainy video showing a teenager taunting his rivals. Prosecutors presented it as evidence of Mr Adedeji’s membership in the gang.

The more times prosecutors played the footage in court, the clearer it became that the man in the video was not Mr. Adedeji. The judge allowed jurors to look at the video, but urged them to be careful before determining who appeared in it.

During the appeal hearing, another teenager confirmed that he was in the video, not Mr Adedeji.

On the basis of this evidence, a three-judge Court of Appeal overturned Mr. Adedeji’s conviction. He will not be retried.

The court, the second highest court in Britain, did not directly address allegations of institutional racism in the ruling. However, the justices wrote that “it is necessary in any case to avoid unfair stereotyping of individuals, on the basis of their race, as gang members.”

Judges upheld the convictions of six men in the case, but reduced the prison sentences of two other defendants, Raymond Safi and Omoled Okoya, who were convicted on similar charges and sentenced to eight years in prison. Their new sentence is four and a half years.

The Crown Prosecution Service, which is leading the prosecutions in England and Wales, said in an email that it respected the court’s decision.

“This was a complex case in which the evidence was carefully assessed for each individual,” the service said.

Mr Adedeji was beaming on Wednesday after being reunited with his family. His parents picked him up from prison and they all stopped at Burger King before returning home. He said the first thing he did when he arrived was hug his younger brothers.

“How many other kids have I met in prison who are in a similar situation to me and would never have this opportunity?” He said.