The Court of Appeal has quashed Yusuf Ali Abdi’s murder conviction and directed a retrial, finding that later psychiatric evidence could have affected the jury’s verdict.
In a judgment delivered on 13 February 2019, the court considered Abdi’s application under section 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993. The application relied on his psychiatric history in custody, including a 2013 diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia after further hospital admissions and treatment. At his 2003 trial, the jury rejected his insanity defence and convicted him of murdering his 20-month-old son. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The trial turned on conflicting psychiatric evidence. Defence experts said Abdi had schizophrenia and could not resist an impulse when he killed his son. The prosecution’s expert, Dr Damien Mohan, disputed that he had psychosis at the time. The Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Abdi’s earlier appeal in 2004.
The Court of Appeal said opinion evidence would not generally qualify as a newly discovered fact under the 1993 Act. It concluded, however, that this case was exceptional. Abdi’s symptoms, treatment and hospital admissions after sentencing were matters of record, and his treating doctors changed his diagnosis in 2013. The court also considered a review by Dr Alex Quinn, commissioned by the Director of Public Prosecutions, which concluded that Abdi had significant symptoms of schizophrenia before the killing.
The court said this later material was not simply a new opinion based on the same evidence available at trial. It included years of subsequent psychiatric history, observations and responses to treatment. Had that material been before the jury, it could have affected how the case was prosecuted or defended and how jurors weighed the competing expert evidence.
The judges said they were not required to decide conclusively whether a miscarriage of justice had occurred. They nevertheless had significant concern that the new material might have influenced the outcome, and concluded that the trial was unsatisfactory and the murder verdict unsafe. They quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial. The judgment did not determine the outcome of any retrial.