Seventeen years. That’s how long Andrew Malkinson sat in a prison cell for a rape he didn’t commit. Now, finally, the man who actually did it has been convicted.
A jury found Peter Pickering guilty this week of the 2003 rape of a woman in Greater Manchester, the very crime for which Malkinson had been wrongly imprisoned since 2004. Pickering, now 57, had long evaded justice while an innocent man served his sentence.
Malkinson’s conviction was quashed in August 2023 after fresh DNA analysis placed Pickering at the scene. It was the kind of forensic breakthrough that should have happened years earlier, and the delay has rightly prompted serious questions about how the system failed so completely for so long.
Malkinson, now 59, spent 17 years maintaining his innocence. He was repeatedly denied parole because he refused to admit guilt, a Kafkaesque detail that still turns the stomach. The Criminal Cases Review Commission had previously rejected his case twice before the innocence charity Appeal took up his cause and pushed for the DNA retesting.
“Andrew Malkinson’s case represents one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in recent British legal history,” his legal team said following the quashing of his conviction. Few would argue with that.
An independent review led by Chris Henley KC later found that the CCRC had made serious errors in handling his case, and that opportunities to identify the real perpetrator had been missed. Greater Manchester Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have also faced scrutiny over the original investigation.
Pickering, it emerged, had a history of serious sexual offending. That information was available. The dots were there to be joined.
Malkinson has received a formal apology from the Justice Secretary and is pursuing compensation, though no sum of money can give back nearly two decades of a man’s life. He has spoken with remarkable composure throughout, though he has every right to be furious.
Pickering will now be sentenced, and justice, of a sort, has arrived. But the bigger question lingers: how many others are sitting in cells right now, waiting for someone to finally look again?
