A man who spent 17 years in prison while wrongly jailed for the rape of a woman in Salford said he was a “handy patsy” for police as the real culprit was convicted.
Andrew Malkinson suffered one of Britain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice when he was wrongly jailed in 2004 for the brutal rape of a woman in Little Hulton following a botched police investigation.
The 60-year-old was denied parole during his time in prison because he maintained his innocence over the “horrific” crime jurors at Manchester Crown Court found was perpetrated by prolific sex offender Paul Quinn.
Malkinson spoke as Quinn was found guilty on Friday 17 April after a six-week trial, three years after his rape conviction was quashed.
Quinn managed to avoid justice for two decades but was identified by police after advances in DNA testing meant that in 2022 a billion match of his DNA profile was made with saliva left on the victim’s vest top.
The former Little Hulton resident was also found guilty of strangulation and grievous bodily harm for an attack on the young mother as she walked home in the Salford suburb in the early hours of the monring on 19 July 2003.
Speaking after Quinn’s convicition, Malkinson said: “I am content that the right result has finally been achieved for the victim, myself and the public.
“But the truth is that if the police had acted as they should have done, Paul Quinn could have been caught a long time ago.
“Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime.”
After the attack, the victim gave a description which two local police officers believed closely matched Mr Malkinson, who worked as a security guard at a local shopping centre.
She told police she had clawed at her attacker’s face, snapping a nail and leaving a deep scratch, but when Mr Malkinson was arrested he had no such scratch and protested his innocence.
Mr Malkinson was picked out by the victim at an identity parade before a second witness picked out a different male and then changed her mind to chose Malkinson.
At his trial, the victim said she had doubts about her identification of Mr Malkinson, but was reassured by detectives her wavering was just “trial nerves”.
No DNA could be found linking Mr Malkinson to the crime and his prosecution rested on identification evidence.
In March 2004, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of seven years in prison.
The victim of the attack said in a statement: “I am very pleased with the verdict today.
“It does not change the fact that two lives have been impacted in such a way, however, justice has been served.
“This investigation has been ongoing for over 20 years.
“It has robbed Mr Malkinson of 17 years in prison, and robbed me of the life I wanted to have.
“The impact of what happened that day stayed with me, and will stay for life.”
James Burley, who led the investigation by legal charity Appeal into Andrew Malkinson’s wrongful conviction welcomed the conviction of Quinn, 23 years after the crime took place.
“We welcome the conviction of the true perpetrator of this appalling crime for which Andrew Malkinson spent over 17 years wrongly imprisoned,” he said.
“However, the grim reality is that Paul Quinn could have been caught years ago, and certainly back in 2012 when his DNA was uploaded to the national database.
“By that point, the authorities had for some years had a searchable DNA profile recovered from the victim’s clothing which did not match Mr Malkinson.
“Yet neither Greater Manchester Police nor the Criminal Cases Review Commission bothered to arrange a further search of the database until 2022, when Appeal had presented further DNA evidence supporting Mr Malkinson’s innocence.
“As a consequence, Mr Malkinson spent a further eight years wrongly imprisoned whilst a violent offender lived freely. New periodic DNA searching rules must be brought in to ensure this situation is never repeated.
“To ensure a wrongful conviction like Mr Malkinson’s cannot happen again, we also call for serious consideration to be given to disallowing prosecutions based solely on unsupported eyewitness identification evidence in future. Certainly, juries need to be given an updated, strengthened warning about the pitfalls of eyewitness identification evidence.
“We also call for there to be full, routine transparency about the criminal histories of all prosecution witnesses – so that in future innocent people like Mr Malkinson are not denied the evidence they need to properly defend themselves, as he was.”
