Andrew Malkinson says the announcement of new DNA testing for disputed rape and murder convictions should have happened a decade ago when the science was first becoming available, a move that would have saved him years in prison.
Malkinson was acquitted by an appeals court last year after serving 17 years in prison for a 2003 rape he did not commit. His acquittal came after new DNA testing linked another man to the crime.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the justice body for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, announced on Monday that DNA testing will be carried out again in rape and murder cases from before 2016, which it had previously refused to refer to court. appeal and where DNA is a factor in identification.
The timing of the announcement comes ahead of the upcoming release of a major review of the Malkinson case, which is expected to be critical.
Malkinson told the Guardian: “This announcement is a tacit recognition of what I have known for a long time: that there will be many innocent people like me who are denied justice by the CCRC.
“The CCRC should have initiated this review 10 years ago, when new DNA profiling technology became available. Their failure to do this, and a series of other failures in the way they handled my case, forced me to spend additional years in prison for a crime I did not commit.”
The CCRC’s work on the case, led by Chris Henley KC, is expected to be published in the coming weeks. Among other things, it will examine what opportunities the agency missed to overturn his conviction.
The Guardian revealed last year that police and prosecutors knew in 2007 that forensic tests had found a searchable male DNA profile on the top of the victim’s vest that did not match Malkinson’s. However, he remained in prison for another 13 years. During this time the CCRC twice refused to appeal his case or order further forensic testing.
Malkinson was exonerated last year after new forensic work linked DNA from the victim’s clothing sample to male DNA in the police database. He has repeatedly called for CCRC chief executive Helen Pitcher to be sacked and her OBE reinstated for her role in extending her prison sentence.
Malkinson, now 58, said: “While I am pleased to see public pressure forcing the CCRC to look again at closed cases, I have little confidence in the integrity of that review as long as the current leadership of the CCRC, which is still winning, continues. “Don’t apologize to me – continue to be accountable.
“There is a need for a radical overhaul of the CCRC, as well as a much wider search for cases wrongly rejected. The CCRC’s failure to properly investigate cases is not limited to missed DNA testing opportunities. In my case, they did not bother to obtain the police file, where there was sufficient evidence to prove my innocence from the beginning.”
In 2013, DNA evidence cleared another man, Victor Nealon, of attempted rape, for which he was wrongfully imprisoned for 17 years. Following this case, the CCRC said in an internal report that it should consider reviewing all similar cases, but no such review was undertaken for Malkinson. It took another decade to clear his name.
The CCRC announced that it is now re-examining approximately 5,500 cases it had previously rejected in light of advances in DNA analysis techniques. He said last summer he found that the identity of the offender was questioned in about a quarter of the cases and that he would focus on those.
He believes DNA samples in several dozen of these cases could be retested using more advanced techniques and is calling for additional government funding to do this as quickly as possible.
Malkinson and his legal team say the practice could begin in 2014, when DNA-17 testing became available, sparing Malkinson many more years in prison.
Emily Bolton, Malkinson’s lawyer at the legal charity Appeal, said the announcement was “a stunning admission that the CCRC may have denied justice to hundreds of other innocent people after missing opportunities for DNA testing in Andrew Malkinson’s case”.
However, he believes the review is “very limited in scope at the moment” because it “will not cover potential miscarriages of justice in attempted murder and sexual assault cases and will apparently not look at missed opportunities to apply other powerful DNA techniques such as the following.” Y-STR profiling.”
A CCRC spokesman said: “The CCRC has been operating for more than 27 years and scientific advances mean there may be new forensic opportunities in cases we last examined several years ago.
“This trawl is an important task and the first work we have undertaken on this scale. It can be quite time consuming, requiring us to have significant additional resources to balance this important work with our existing case studies.
“Our goal is to find, investigate and address potential injustices, so it is imperative that we take advantage of the opportunities presented by scientific advances to do this.”