LETTER FROM LONDON

On July 26, Andrew Malkinson, 57, walked out of the Court of Appeal in London a free man. He was officially cleared after 17 years behind bars for a crime – an ultra-violent rape on the outskirts of Manchester in 2003 – that he did not commit. His terrible story is one of the UK's worst miscarriages of justice, and it highlights serious dysfunctions in the country's police and judicial systems.

"The judge said: 'You can walk away a free man,' and that's when I started shaking. My eyes welled up but I wasn't ready to start crying. One of the first things I thought was: This means I can go away on holiday," Malkinson shared as he left the Court of Appeal to journalist Emily Dugan of the Guardian, who had been following his case for months. "Now I have finally been exonerated, I am left outside this court without an apology, without an explanation, jobless, homeless, expected to simply slip back into the world with no acknowledgment of the gaping black hole they opened up in my life," added the man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a voice trembling with anger.

In 2003, at the age of 37, Malkinson had a passion for travel, which he financed through a series of odd jobs. Born in Grimsby, in the northeast of England, he was visiting the UK after spending several years in the Netherlands. With no criminal record, he was arrested by the police two weeks after a 33-year-old woman was raped and left for dead in the early hours of July 19, 2003, in Salford, a city in the Manchester area. In February 2004, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of seven years by a jury of his peers after the victim claimed to have recognized him, but without any physical or DNA evidence to prove his guilt.

Behind bars, he tirelessly proclaimed his innocence, refusing to take part in rehabilitation programs that could have earned him an early release: "I thought through it, but the idea of lying (...) and pretending I've done something as horrific as that, I couldn't even contemplate it," he told BBC Radio 4 shortly after the appeal judgment. Supported by a network of friends and a charity, Appeal, that fights for the recognition of miscarriages of justice, Malkinson was released from prison in December 2020 (for good behavior), but he had to wait another two and a half years for his conviction for sexual offenses to be finally erased.

Twice, in 2012 and 2020, he had applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the independent body responsible for considering applications for retrial, but to no avail. However, as early as 2007, the police knew that male DNA that was not Malkinson's had been found on the victim's clothing, in places considered significant to the crime, and that it belonged neither to her boyfriend nor to Malkinson. But the CCRC refused to carry out further DNA tests. It was the Appeal organization that carried out the examinations and finally obtained a trial on appeal. A man, "Mr. B." (the court forbids naming him), whose DNA matches that identified long ago, is now under investigation.

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