07/08/2023
Police Oracle
Yesterday, the Ministry of Justice announced that people wrongly convicted of criminal offences who spend time in prison will no longer have their prison “living costs” deducted from the compensation to which they are entitled.
This practice was based on the (perhaps dubious) basis that while people were wrongfully imprisoned, they were saving on their rent or mortgage costs.
It was in response to the case of Andrew Malkinson who served seventeen years in prison for a crime he did not commit that the government decided to act. Mr Malkinson was convicted in 2004 of raping a 33-year-old woman who was left for dead on a motorway embankment in Salford, Greater Manchester.
After enduring two decades of being labelled a sex offender, Mr Malkinson, who is now 57, had his conviction quashed on 26 July after new DNA evidence was admitted.
Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, vice-president of the appeal court, said the appeal was allowed on the basis of the DNA evidence and reserved judgment on whether it would be allowed on other issues, including police disclosure.
There was never any DNA linking Malkinson to the crime and he always insisted he was innocent, spending more than double the time in prison as a result.
As many readers will know, people who maintain their innocence for serious offences tend to serve much longer in prison. Release on parole is typically conditional on people accepting their crime and satisfactorily completing relevant offending behaviour programmes.
Those who deny their culpability are seen as avoiding responsibility for their offence and therefore too risky to be released. It is an archetypal, and particularly awful Catch-22 situation.
Mr Malkinson’s case was re-referred to the court of appeal in January this year only after another man’s DNA was found on fragments of the victim’s clothing.
Reading a statement to journalists outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Mr Malkinson said: “I came to the police station in 2003 and told the officers I was innocent. They didn’t believe me.
“I came to the crown court in Manchester in 2004 and told the jury I was innocent. They didn’t believe me. I came to this appeal court in 2006 and told them I was innocent. They didn’t believe me.
“I applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is supposed to investigate miscarriages of justice, and told them I was innocent. They didn’t investigate and they didn’t believe me. Not once, but twice.
“Today we told this court I was innocent and, finally, they listened. But I have been innocent all along, for each of those 20 years that came before today. Nothing any police officer, court or commission said about me since 2003 changed that reality.”
Mr Malkinson’s case also casts a poor light on the Criminal Cases Review Commission which has been struggling with unprecedented backlogs as well as criticisms of government interference and complaints about some individual cases.
Two years ago the All Party-Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice published the results of an inquiry into the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) after the number of cases of people claiming to be wrongly convicted sent to the Court of Appeal crashed – from an average of 33 referrals a year to just a dozen in 2017 or less than 1% of the people who applied to the body every year.
The inquiry, known as the Westminster Commission, heard concerns that the CCRC’s independence had been undermined by the government ‘unlawful interference’ and that overall number of commissioners fell from 8.8 (full time equivalent) in 2014 to just 2.5 in 2019. There are currently 11 out of 12 commissioners in post, but the CCRC website does not provide information about how many of these are working full or part time.
The latest CCRC figures (from last month) show some improvements in the proportion of cases closed within twelve months of application over the last year but an unprecedented number (62) of cases which have been under review for over two years.
It seems that the government may need to invest more money in the CCRC to ensure that wrongful convictions are remedied as quickly as possible.