For 17 years, Andrew Malkinson went to bed in his cell every night hoping that one day science would set him free. He was serving a life sentence for the rape of a 33-year-old woman left for dead on a Salford motorway embankment in 2003. There was never any DNA linking him to the crime, but his insistence of his innocence only trapped him in prison for longer.
This week, almost two decades after he was first arrested, science may finally have come to his aid. On Tuesday morning, Malkinson’s case was referred back to the court of appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission after a new DNA sample from the victim’s clothing matched a man on the national database.
