On 30 March 2004, I was sentenced to life in prison for a crime I did not commit. As I was being led to the cells, I told the courtroom, loudly: “I am completely innocent.” But no one listened, and to borrow a quote from Robinson Crusoe, one of my favourite childhood books, I found myself “cast upon a horrible, desolate island”: the English prison system.
I emerged from that system after spending more than 17 years behind bars, having finally been granted the parole that had been denied many times before because I had continued to protest my innocence. It took a further two and a half years of fighting before, at last, I was able to stand outside the Royal Courts of Justice a free, exonerated man.
This week, a report was published that begins to lay bare why my battle to clear my name was so difficult and protracted. Authored by Chris Henley KC, it levels “severe criticism” at the body that is meant to root out miscarriages of justice and send cases back to the appeal courts: the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). I did not believe I could get any angrier about what has been done to me, but reading Henley’s findings incensed me.
I first applied to the CCRC in 2009. Back then I genuinely hoped the body would deliver me justice: I knew it had special investigative powers and was meant to act as a safety net for wrongly convicted prisoners like me. But that’s not how things turned out, and in 2012 I got my first crushing CCRC rejection. As Henley details in his report, the CCRC had failed to “get to grips” with DNA evidence that supported my innocence. On top of that, it did not bother to obtain the police file in which further undisclosed evidence of my innocence lay hidden. Henley’s report vindicates what I have long believed: if the CCRC had done its job properly first time round, it could have spared me a decade behind bars.
I got another CCRC rejection in 2020. It was left to my legal team at the charity Appeal to do the work the CCRC should have done long before. Appeal commissioned further DNA tests and uncovered disclosure failures that finally forced the CCRC to send my case to the court of appeal in January 2023. I was exonerated in July that year.
Given the obvious failings, you’d think the CCRC’s leadership would have shown some contrition in the aftermath of my exoneration. In fact, its chair, Helen Pitcher, spent the next eight months refusing to offer me an apology. Henley’s report rightly criticises her for this, and for her public statements made in the days following my appeal in which she “claimed too much credit … took too little responsibility” and wrongly presented my case as “an unqualified success”.
After this insulting behaviour from a figure who should have shown leadership and humility, you’ll have to forgive me for not accepting Pitcher’s belated apology. She only offered it to me after she received Henley’s scathing findings. You’ll also understand why I don’t buy her accompanying “assurance” that the CCRC is committed to learning from my case. If Pitcher and her fellow higher-ups were serious about accountability and transparency, they would not have withheld from the report the names of the CCRC personnel whose decisions have caused me and my loved ones so much pain. Nor would they be continuing to deny me access to records about my case that I am entitled to under the Data Protection Act. This all smacks of guilt. Public bodies and officials must own the responsibility they wield – hiding in the shadows only allows injustice to continue.
The truth is that there is something deeply wrong at the CCRC and nothing less than a complete overhaul is needed. Proof of this comes from a discovery made by Henley that shook me to my core. The CCRC, he found, was contemplating rejecting my case for a third time in 2022. By that point, Appeal had presented the CCRC with DNA evidence which, in Henley’s words, “provided a compelling basis to conclude that another man was responsible for the brutal attack”. Yet the CCRC was seriously considering denying me justice once again. If that doesn’t persuade the government that the CCRC is biased in favour of dismissing miscarriage of justice cases rather than accepting the police and prosecution may have got it wrong, I don’t know what will.
The CCRC currently rejects more than 97% of the applications it receives. I know for a fact that this is not because every one of those applicants is guilty (after all, I was twice one of those rejected people). It’s because the CCRC is not investigating and deciding cases properly. Unless the government takes serious action, the CCRC will continue to fail innocent people like me. I want to see the CCRC put under a strict legal duty to pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry before turning down a case, with refusals made readily challengeable before an impartial tribunal.
First and foremost, though, I want to see Pitcher booted out – and I’m encouraged that so, too, does the new justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood. “It is my firm view that Helen Pitcher is unfit to fulfil her duties as chair of the CCRC,” she said. “I have therefore begun the process to seek her removal from that position.” Pitcher and her discredited and incompetent senior leadership team should now be replaced with people with a track record of fighting injustice without fear or favour. Survivors of wrongful conviction like me and the post office operators should have input into the recruitment process.
While the police and prosecution caused my wrongful conviction nightmare, the CCRC must take its share of the blame for needlessly prolonging it by more than a decade. The whole institution needs to be torn down and completely rebuilt.
Andrew Malkinson is a former prisoner rebuilding his life after he was wrongfully convicted in 2004 of a stranger rape in the Greater Manchester area
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