A man who "confessed" in jail to a murder he had been cleared of, but escaped retrial, has failed to get his conviction for lying in court about the killing overturned.

Ricky Sanjuliano - then Ricky Miell - was acquitted in June, 1996, of the murder of Stephen Burton in a house in Cowley Road, Oxford, earlier that year.

But while behind bars for unrelated offences, Sanjuliano told prison visitors, including Jehovah's witnesses, and a prison supervisor, that he had carried out the killing and later admitted a charge of perjury by lying to his original murder trial jury.

Yet, when he was arrested in July, 2007, on suspicion of murder, after the law on double jeopardy had been changed, he claimed that his confession had been part of a "game" to win his early release and get respect from other prisoners.

He asked the nation's top judge, Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips - sitting with Mrs Justice Dobbs and Mr Justice Underhill at London's Criminal Appeal Court, to overturn the perjury conviction.

However, his application was said to be "entirely opportunistic".