"It is likely on the balance of probability that the plea he entered at the court proceeding was very likely linked to his mental illness … complicated by the psychosocial stress of being in a hospital environment he did not like. This would also have been further compounded by the stress of the court proceedings as well. It is my opinion that under these circumstances he would thus not have fully understood the distinction between the various pleas – his decision to plead not guilty which he then changed to a plea of guilty to murder, and then his rejection of the offer to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. It would appear that while he was under the influences of symptoms of his mental disorder it was likely that he would not have understood the range and nature of verdicts the judge within law could arrive at and what these would mean for him whilst being mentally unwell, experiencing psychotic symptoms …"
"I am thus of the opinion that [the applicant] was on the balance of probability not fit to plea at the time of the court hearing."
"Assuming that the defendant is legally represented (and in cases like these, he will normally be represented by leading and junior counsel, as well as solicitors) his legal representatives are the persons best placed to decide whether to raise the issue of fitness to plead, and indeed to seek medical assistance to resolve the problem. There is a separate and distinct judicial responsibility to oversee the process so that if there is any question of the defendant's fitness to plead, the judge can raise it directly with his legal advisers. Unless there is contemporaneous evidence to suggest that notwithstanding his plea and the apparent satisfaction of his legal advisers and the judge that he was fit to tender it, and participate in the trial, it will be very rare indeed for a later reconstruction, even by distinguished psychiatrists who did not examine the appellant at the time of trial, to persuade the court that notwithstanding the earlier trial process and the safeguards built into it that the appellant was unfit to plead, or close to being unfit or that his decision to deny the offence and not advance diminished responsibility can properly be explained on this basis. The situation is, of course, different if, as in Erskine, serious questions about his fitness to plead were raised in writing or expressly before the judge at the trial."
"The applicant's fitness to plead, according to the correct legal criteria, was established at the time of his trial in 2015 to the satisfaction of his experienced and senior defence team on the basis of three psychiatrists' reports. Those reports themselves appear to have been carefully considered; they are clear and explicit about the applicant's mental ill-health but assess him as fit to plead notwithstanding his problems. Fitness to plead was not therefore seriously in question before the court. There is no contemporary evidence that the applicant's change of plea during the course of his trial was defective or should not properly have been accepted. The opinion now expressed by Dr Olotu in a report dated in February 2022 does not arguably make a case that this is one of those 'very rare indeed' instances. The report is inevitably by way of review and retrospective hypothesis many years after the event, does not expressly address the legal criteria, and cannot arguably provide a potentially determinative counterweight to the clear professional consensus arrived at [at] the time."