Authorities knew a British man was wrongly convicted of rape five years after he was sentenced to life, but failed to release the evidence, a new report has found.
Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in jail for a 2003 rape he didn’t commit, but has only now learned that authorities knew he was innocent five years after he was sentenced, the BBC reported. He should have been released from prison and exonerated at that time, a report looking into the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) concluded.
The report found that the CCRC failed to look into evidence of Malkinson’s innocence all the way up until 2022. Malkinson is now calling for top-to-bottom reforms of the commission and the resignation or firing of its chair, Helen Pitcher.
Malkinson said the report “lays bare how the CCRC obstructed my fight for justice and cost me an extra decade wrongly imprisoned.”
“If Helen Pitcher and her leadership team won’t resign after a scathing report like this, they should be sacked,” he added, according to Sky News.
Pitcher apologized to Malkinson, saying it was “clear the commission failed” him.
“Nobody can begin to imagine the devastating impact that this wrongful conviction has had on Mr Malkinson’s life, and I am deeply sorry for the additional harm caused by our handling of the case,” she added. “On behalf of the commission, I offer my deepest regret.”
The CCRC, in its own response to the report, said it would “learn from the mistakes that were made,” adding that the reform recommendations from Chris Henley, the lawyer appointed by the government to review Malkinson’s case, “will be acted upon, and work to address them has already started.”
In 2003, Malkinson was accused of raping a woman in Greater Manchester, the BBC reported. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison even though there was no DNA to link him to the crime. His conviction relied on contested eyewitness accounts from people who placed him near the scene, even though he didn’t match the description of the rapist or have a deep scratch on his face, which the victim said she had inflicted on her attacker during the rape.
Three years after he went to prison, forensic scientists were able to find DNA from the victim’s clothing that pointed to a different, then-unknown man. By 2009, the Greater Manchester Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the CCRC knew about this evidence, but rejected Malkinson’s pleas to overturn his conviction. In 2013, the CCRC again failed to review Malkinson’s file, even though the Court of Appeal exonerated a different man of a rape in nearly identical circumstances. The CCRC again dismissed Malkinson’s attempt at exoneration in 2019. It also considered rejecting his third plea in 2022.
The damning report found that the CCRC only referred the case back to judges after a legal charity helped Malkinson win a motion to have new DNA analysis conducted.
Henley, the lawyer in charge of the report, said he didn’t believe the CCRC would have ever done the work to exonerate Malkinson on its own.
“It had taken 20 years to put this appalling miscarriage of justice right,” Henley said, according to the BBC. “This case demonstrates a deep-seated, system-wide cultural reluctance, which starts right at the top in the Court of Appeal, to acknowledge our criminal justice system will on occasion make mistakes. It is not by any standard a success, or a demonstration that things are working properly, that Mr. Malkinson had to wait 20 years to be exonerated.”
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