Offices of the Birmingham headquarters of the Criminal Cases Review Commission for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Photo courtesy Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The head of a British judicial body that is supposed to help people who have been wrongly convicted resigned over a case of an innocent man who spent 17 years of a life sentence in prison for a violent rape committed by someone else.
Criminal Cases Review Commission Chair Helen Pitcher quit Tuesday, 18 months after Andrew Malkinson walked free from the Court of Appeal after justices accepted DNA evidence implicating another man in the 2003 rape of a 33-year-old woman who was left for dead by the side of a motorway.
Overturning his conviction, the court ruled there was no physical or forensic evidence linking Malkinson to the crime and that he had been the victim of a "grave miscarriage of justice."
Following a failed appeal in 2006, Malkinson spent more than a decade trying to persuade the commission to review his case. The CCRC rejected applications by his legal team in 2009 and 2018 before referring the case back to the Court of Appeal in January 2023 at the third attempt, with years of delays on each occasion.
Pitcher said she was resigning because her position had become untenable following an independent inquiry into Malkinson's case ordered by then-Conservative Justice Secretary Alex Chalk that was highly critical of the way the CCRC was run.
However, she hit back against widespread criticism directed at her personally, complaining in her resignation letter to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood that she had been made to take the fall for historic failings that occurred long before she was appointed in November 2018.
Pitcher noted that Greater Manchester Police [the investigating police force] and the Crown Prosecution Service had not been singled out in the way she had.
"A head had to roll and I was chosen for that role," she wrote. "I have been scapegoated for entirely legitimate operational decisions that were not handled by any non-executive CCRC chair before I joined the organization.
"The original rejection of Mr. Malkinson's appeal was almost a decade before my time: on my watch, armed with new DNA evidence which we commissioned, we were able to resolve the situation and set Mr Malkinson free."
Malkinson told BBC Radio on Wednesday that he felt his ordeal was finally over.
"She's been complaining that she's been made a scapegoat but I was made a scapegoat, she has been made accountable and I feel vindicated," Malkinson said.
He also rejected claims Pitcher's claim she was not responsible for his initial applications being rejected and that he was released "on her watch" due to the new DNA evidence recovered at the CCRC's instigation.
He said the success of his appeal was all down to a legal charity that works pro bono to challenge miscarriages of justice which took on his case.
"Appeal did all the work that Ms. Pitcher has claimed credit for. It's patently untrue that CCRC did all the work to set me free it was Appeal that set me free," said Malkinson.
Pitcher had previously apologized to Malkinson for the "devastating impact that this wrongful conviction has had on Mr. Malkinson's life" and expressed sorrow and her deepest regrets for the additional harm caused by the commission's handling of the case.
She had also begun working on implementing the nine recommendations made by the inquiry.
Pitcher compared her situation to that of Post Office chairman Henry Staunton who was fired by the previous Conservative government over the wrongful theft, fraud and false accounting convictions of hundreds of Post Office sub-contractors who were found guilty on evidence obtained from defective Fujitsu software.
"Like me, he joined the organization to fix the failures that had already occurred," but took the rap "because somebody had to," she said, while noting the central role the CCRC had played in securing justice for many of the wrongly convicted sub-postmasters.
The CCRC is an independent body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland has its own, separate, Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.
