The Court of Appeal has dismissed a challenge to a murder conviction dating back more than two decades, ruling that the trial judge was not wrong to keep manslaughter off the jury's list of possible verdicts.

Robert Knapp was convicted of murder on 19 July 2002 at the Central Criminal Court and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 20 years less time spent on remand. His case reached the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) on a reference from the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which argued there was a real possibility the conviction was unsafe because the jury had not been offered manslaughter as an alternative.

The killing of Mohammed Raja

The prosecution case was that Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, who was in a business dispute with Mohammed Raja, asked Knapp, who worked for him as an enforcer, to arrange Mr Raja's killing. Knapp recruited David Croke, and the two men visited Mr Raja at his home on the morning of 2 July 1999, where he was repeatedly stabbed and shot in the face with a sawn-off shotgun.

Croke was also convicted of murder and has since died. Van Hoogstraten was acquitted of murder but convicted of manslaughter; his appeal against that conviction was later allowed and a retrial ordered, but he was never re-tried. Knapp's earlier applications for leave to appeal were refused in 2003.

Why the appeal failed

The judgment in Robert Knapp v R [2026] EWCA Crim 1437, handed down on 10 November 2026, restated that a trial judge bears the ultimate responsibility for leaving any obviously available lesser verdict to the jury. But the panel, led by Lord Justice Jeremy Baker, found that on the evidence in this case the jury had not been unfairly deprived of a realistic lesser verdict.

The court noted that the trial judge had left manslaughter to the jury in Van Hoogstraten's case, but neither Knapp's nor Croke's counsel had asked for the same direction for their clients. The court examined the trial record, the judge's direction on joint enterprise and the identification evidence, and concluded there was no material misdirection of the kind that would make the murder verdict unsafe. The appeal was therefore dismissed.

The ruling shows how narrow the route is for historic convictions to be overturned where a lesser verdict was not offered.