It was a moment for which he had waited nearly 20 years, but when Andrew Malkinson’s exoneration finally came on Wednesday his first thought was a very prosaic one: at last he could go on holiday. “The judge said: ‘You can walk away a free man,’ and that’s when I started shaking,” he said in an interview with the Guardian after a hearing that overturned his conviction for the rape of a woman in Greater Manchester in 2003.
“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.”
Since 2004 Malkinson has lived with a conviction for rape that meant even when he was released from prison on good behaviour after more than 17 years, his freedoms were severely curtailed. His biggest love, travelling, was off-limits given that few countries would grant a visa to a convicted sex offender.
Outside the appeal court, Malkinson gave a speech peppered with dignified fury. Normally a softly spoken man, he held nothing back against Greater Manchester police (GMP), whom he branded liars for their role in failing to disclose multiple flaws in the case against him and destroying key exhibits.
Speaking afterwards, he returned to his usual quieter self, comforted by a spaniel called Basil, his lawyer’s dog who waited outside court for him. But his outrage at the injustice he suffered was unabated.
Wednesday’s hearing was the first time that the extent of GMP’s disclosure failures were made public. They included the fact that the court was never told that a key witness only came forward on the day he was arrested for another crime – and that he was addicted to heroin and had multiple criminal convictions the court were unaware of.
There was never any DNA linking Malkinson to the crime – and he always maintained his innocence – but his conviction was overturned after new forensic testing revealed another man’s DNA on a sample of the victim’s clothing.
“DNA has proved my innocence,” he said. “But the other grounds are to me as important, because if it weren’t for those terrible failures by GMP, I wouldn’t have been convicted, I would have had a fair trial.”
Malkinson’s lawyer, Emily Bolton, the director of the legal charity Appeal, said afterwards that an arcane system meant it would be years before he could be compensated.
When Malkinson was first arrested for the crime 20 years ago he was only supposed to be on a brief visit to the UK, having enjoyed life as a backpacker. His plans before then had been to continue not to have any – to “live care-free” and maybe make a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia one day soon.
In a letter from prison in 2020, he wrote to this reporter across 13 handwritten pages about his former life, the moments that led to his wrongful conviction and its impact. “I feel I have changed and been changed by the sheer trauma of being forcibly – kidnapped – is the right word, by the state,” he wrote.
Listing his priorities on release, his first was categorical: “Clear my name completely, with zero doubt.”
On Wednesday that happened, but the damage cannot be undone.
He was 37 when he went into prison. Now 57 and suffering from diabetes, his life is very different from the one that was snatched from him in 2003.
He recalled: “I had a happy and rather simple life, in fact I was pretty naive as I look back on it. I’d worked in Holland since 1993 and since that time become a permanent resident. I loved the freedom of living abroad, and I had enough experience of travelling to feel completely at home.”
His last serious relationship was with Karin Schuitemaker, whom he met when he was doing casual work in Holland. She always stood by him, saying she knew he was incapable of the crime and writing letters of support to authorities in the UK.
After the hearing on Wednesday he called Schuitemaker to tell her the news. He need not have worried: she had been watching it on the livestream all day and was full of ebullient congratulations. “It’s been really emotional,” he told her. “It’s not sinking in.”
This weekend he plans to leave the country and go travelling again. He is not fussy about the location – “Anywhere that’s not the UK,” he quips.
His mother, Trish Malkinson, has also been a constant support.
When he took his first steps out of HMP Seacamp in December 2020 and hugged her under dark grey skies, he whispered in her ear: “It’s all over now.” But he would endure another two and a half years branded a sex offender, with the intrusive parole interviews and restricted freedom that entailed.
Trish, 77, was in court on Wednesday. Her relief was tempered by a quiet fury at what the justice system has put her son through.
“It’s a third of his life that’s gone. He can never replace it, can he? It doesn’t matter the outcome or what compensation.”
On Wednesday, just as he had outside prison, Malkinson hugged his mum again. He said: “I told her it’s over this time, it really is.”
