A jury has retired to consider verdicts in the trial of a man accused of a brutal stranger rape in Salford for which an innocent man spent 17 years in jail.
Paul Quinn, 51, who denies the sex attack in 2003, was arrested nearly 20 years later only after a DNA breakthrough, by which time Andrew Malkinson had been wrongly convicted and jailed.
Jurors retired to consider verdicts on Monday afternoon as the trial at Manchester Crown Court entered its sixth week.
Earlier in the trial, John Price KC, prosecuting, told the court Mr Malkinson, working as a security guard at a shopping centre, was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
The victim, a mother-of-two in her 30s, was dragged from the street beside a motorway embankment as she walked home in the early hours of July 19 2003.
She was brutally beaten, with a nipple almost severed from a bite and her cheekbone fractured, strangled unconscious and twice raped.
No DNA evidence linked Mr Malkinson to the crime but he was wrongly picked out at an identity parade by three people.
In fact, father-of-six Quinn, aged 29 at the time and who lived a mile from the crime scene in Clegg’s Lane, Little Hulton, was the real rapist, the jury heard.
A “slow-burn” process using improved techniques of re-testing DNA samples led to a billion-to-one match of Quinn’s DNA profile left on the victim’s vest top, the court was told.
The sample from the vest top had been identified in 2007 as coming from “Unknown Male 1”, and analysis had ruled out any link to Mr Malkinson.
It was not until 2022 that police matched it to the defendant, who had given police a sample of his own DNA in 2012.
Quinn was arrested in 2022 and denies any offences.
He was accused of trying to explain away the DNA evidence through inadvertent transfer of his DNA, claiming to have led a highly promiscuous party lifestyle, having casual sex with hundreds or even thousands of local women.
On the night of the attack, his ex-wife, Catherine Quinn, told the court her then-husband returned home from a night out without his shirt.
Quinn told the jury analysis of his internet usage showed he had searched for “wrongful conviction”, and he had an interest in true crime stories, with Mr Malkinson’s long campaign to clear his name in the news.
During cross-examination, Mr Price suggested only two people knew Mr Malkinson’s was a wrongful conviction – the innocent man and the man who really carried out the attack, Quinn.
Evidence also showed Quinn had searched about how long DNA is kept by police and he had “feared a knock on the door” was coming.
Mr Malkinson, now aged 60 and originally from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, made multiple appeals before he was released from jail in 2020 and his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal.
Quinn, who moved from Little Hulton to Exeter, Devon in 2017, after he separated and was divorced from his wife, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape and two alternative counts of indecent assault.
He also denies grievous bodily harm and attempting to choke or strangle his victim to render her unconscious while he carried out the attack.
The jury has been sent home and will resume deliberations on Tuesday at 10.15am.
By Pat Hurst, Press Association
