‘Trew’s Law’ urges automatic review of jailed cop’s files to prevent miscarriages of justice
source: The Justice Gap
published: 11 September 2026
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Lawmakers are being urged to enact a new piece of legislation that would see police officers who are sent to prison for corruption and other offences immediately having their past cases reviewed to prevent miscarriages of justice.
Trew’s Law would enact a statutory duty to immediately review the case files of the approximately 21 police officers per year who are convicted and sent to prison. Currently a serving police officer can be jailed for offences including corruption, dishonesty, and abuse of their position, but there is no duty to systematically reviews cases they investigated to ensure innocent people weren’t fitted up or implicated by their wrongdoing.
Between 2018 and 2025, 13 people had their convictions quashed after spending a combined 623 years wrongfully convicted as a result of one corrupt police officer. Derek Ridgewell was behind several notorious miscarriages of justice including the Oval Four and Stockwell Six.
He routinely fitted up young black men to cover up his own thefts while working for the British Transport Police. He was protected by his force, and even after he was convicted and imprisoned in 1980 there was no effort to review or re-consider the convictions of those he had ensured were wrongfully convicted.
The campaign is named after Winston Trew, a victim of Ridgewell, who spent 50 years trying to clear his name. There are still people coming forward to appeal their convictions as a result of Ridgewell’s misconduct – the fifteenth man to have his conviction overturned was Errol Campbell whose case was quashed in the Court of Appeal in July 2025, though this came over 20 years after his death.
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