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Youth worker must serve six-year term
A YOUTH worker whose friends launched a massive campaign calling for his release from jail has lost his appeal against conviction for conspiring to rob a security van.
Garnet Ampong, 22, from Kentish Town, was jailed for six years after he was found guilty in July last year.
He was arrested after police were alerted by a Securicor van driver in Hampstead High Street in January last year.
His friends and family have always protested his innocence and more than 1,200 supporters signed up to the fledgling rapper’s MySpace page “Free G 2010”, leaving more than 600 messages. Earlier this year, friends fighting for his freedom printed campaign T-shirts.
But on Thursday Court of Appeal judges rejected Mr Ampong’s fight to clear his name.
Lord Justice Anthony Hughes acknowledged the evidence against Mr Ampong – whose work with young people was praised during his trial at Harrow Crown Court – was circumstantial.
But he described Mr Ampong’s account of the events leading up to his arrest as “barely credible”.
On January 26 last year, Mr Ampong and an acquaintance were driving in Hampstead High Street when police were called by the van’s driver, who had become alarmed and suspected he was being followed after the car stopped twice when he did. When police searched Mr Ampong, who was wearing three tops and three pairs of trousers, they found an open lock-knife in his front pocket.
At his trial, Mr Ampong’s lawyers argued he had confiscated the knife from a group of youths the day before and that the pair were not following the van but test-driving the car.
On Thursday his legal team called for the conviction to be overturned on the basis that it was “unsafe” because of comments made by the judge to the trial jury before they considered their verdict.
Their argument that the judge had influenced the jury in commenting on Mr Ampong’s defence was accepted by the appeal panel.
But Lord Justice Hughes, Mr Justice Andrew Smith and Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith ruled the summing up did not affect the overall outcome of the trial of Mr Ampong and his co-accused.
Lord Justice Hughes said: “The case against these defendants was circumstantial, but undoubtedly very strong. The admitted movements called for an explanation.
“The evidence of the defendants never, as it seems to us, really provided a plausible explanation for a number of agreed facts, let alone for all of them. They were, frankly, barely credible.”
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