70 years of wrongful convictions: How our justice system's safety net failed

Telegraph

14-05-2025

In Peter Sullivan's police mugshot, from the time of his arrest for the murder of Diane Sindall in 1986, he is 30 years old, wide-eyed and somewhat boyish, with an unruly mess of dark hair. Appearing via video link from Wakefield Prison this week for the Court of Appeal hearing that would decide his fate, now 68, he was looking older than his years with a greying beard and deep lines etched on his brow. As his conviction was overturned, he held his hand to his mouth and wept.
In total, Sullivan served 38 years in prison for the murder of the 21-year-old – a shocking crime that he did not commit. Like Victor Nealon and Andrew Malkinson, both wrongly imprisoned for rape, Sullivan was released after new DNA evidence exonerated him. It was the result he had been praying for. But the fact remains that Sullivan, Nealon and Malkinson, who together spent more than 70 years wrongly imprisoned, were failed by the system and, in terms of their appeals, failed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) – the publicly funded legal panel that investigates miscarriages of justice.
The CCRC is supposed to act as an essential safety net for the British justice system, investigating potential miscarriages of justice and sending cases back to court where it suspects there has been a wrongful conviction.
In recent years, however, it has become better known for upholding grave miscarriages of justice than for correcting them. Lord Falconer, a former secretary of state for justice, went so far as to say it is 'unled and generally regarded as useless'.
Take the case of Andrew Malkinson, imprisoned in 2004 for a rape committed in Salford, Greater Manchester. The CCRC twice rejected Malkinson's appeals, in 2008 and 2018, despite evidence that it was aware of fresh DNA evidence unearthed in 2007 that could have freed him.
In total, he spent 17 years behind bars for a rape that he did not commit. When he was finally acquitted, there was little doubt as to whom he blamed for this appalling injustice. 'I applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is supposed to investigate miscarriages of justice, and told them I was innocent,' he said outside court. 'They didn't investigate and they didn't believe me.'
The catastrophic mishandling of the case eventually led to an apology from the CCRC and the resignation of its chair, Helen Pitcher, after an independent panel ruled she was no longer fit to chair the organisation. It later transpired that Pitcher had been in Montenegro promoting her property business while the organisation she chaired was in crisis. Chris Henley KC, who led an independent review into the organisation in the aftermath of Malkinson's case, warned that more miscarriages of justice were 'inevitable'.
Then there is the case of Victor Nealon, a former postman, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 17 years for an attempted rape in 1996. His conviction was quashed in 2013 after a CCRC referral to the Court of Appeal on the basis of new DNA evidence that exonerated him. But it was his legal team that ordered the DNA testing that eventually cleared his name, not the CCRC, which had twice rejected his case and dismissed Nealon's plea to commission DNA testing as 'speculative'. Nealon later said: 'I spent an additional 10 years in prison because [the CCRC] accepted at face value evidence given by the police.'
Sullivan, too, had appealed to the CCRC for help in 2008, 21 years into his sentence. The DNA testing that would eventually clear his name was not yet advanced enough. On advice that said DNA testing was unlikely to unveil anything new, the CCRC rejected his appeal.
As the public body tasked with keeping the justice system in check, the CCRC has, on several occasions, failed to do so. That wasn't always the case. The Criminal Cases Review Commission was established in 1995 in response to the Birmingham Six – a notorious miscarriage of justice in which six men from Northern Ireland were wrongly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Before that, if someone who protested their innocence had their case rejected by the Court of Appeal, their only recourse was to go to C3, a small and wholly inadequate department buried within the Home Office.
The CCRC, then, was set up with noble intentions, decent public funding, and the expertise of experienced senior lawyers and investigative journalists who joined as salaried commissioners. They would ultimately make the decision on whether to send a case back to the courts. The staff would 'reflect the broad mix of legal, investigative and administrative skills and experience needed', the home secretary said at the time. It was to be independent from the government and became a critical safeguard which was replicated internationally – similar organisations were subsequently set up in Scotland, Norway, North Carolina and New Zealand.
The question, then, is what happened in the intervening years. Problems began to arise when the organisation moved away from salaried commissioners roughly a decade ago, and instead appointed part-time commissioners paid a comparatively meagre day rate.
Lord Garnier KC, who served as solicitor general from May 2010 to September 2012, says the CCRC has been treated as a 'poor relative' and lacks 'a sense of coherence and day-to-day grip' as a result. 'I have said that, metaphorically, it's at the end of a very long corridor in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), at the bottom of the pile for funding and so forth,' he says. 'If you have commissioners who supervise the casework just coming in on a day rate, they don't have the ability to dive deeply into the cases they're looking after. You lack a collegiate sense of responsibility.'
As a result, the organisation became slower and more stilted. The Commons' Justice Committee recommended in 2015 that the CCRC should be 'less cautious' in referring cases on. Still, the percentage of cases referred back to the Court of Appeal dropped further – between its creation in 1995 and 2015-16, it was 3.43 per cent, but by 2019-20, it had dropped to 1.95 per cent. Questions have also been raised over its independence from the MoJ. In 2020, the High Court ruled that the CCRC had a 'dysfunctional' relationship with the MoJ that allowed for 'political interference' from the government.
Then came the Covid pandemic and, with it, a remote-working policy that remains in place to this day. The CCRC made the decision to allow staff to work almost completely remotely, despite the importance and complexity of their work. 'Although I'm sure sometimes you can run a business entirely remotely, this is not one of them,' Lord Garnier says.
The organisation's chief executive, Karen Kneller, faced heavy criticism when she told a committee of MPs that she comes into the office in Birmingham only 'one or two days every couple of months' – a staggering admission for a senior executive who is reportedly called 'Karen Invisible' by staff. Kneller has also reportedly been a regular visitor to Insead business school in Fontainebleau, France, where she attended a 10-day course whose fees are advertised at more than £21,000. A month before Malkinson's conviction was quashed, Kneller was given a 7.5 per cent pay rise and a £10,000 bonus. Her pay in 2024 was roughly £130,000.
Its critics argue that the CCRC has fallen victim to a cost-cutting mentality, with more focus on throughput and hitting targets than the often time-consuming and costly work of thorough investigation. It is true that the watchdog suffered significant budget cuts in the austerity years. The MoJ's budget was cut by 25 per cent between 2010 and 2018, which resulted in knock-on cuts to the CCRC. At the same time as its budget was being squeezed, it found the number of cases referred to it had increased exponentially.
Nearly a decade on, however, Lord Garnier argues that this cannot be used as an excuse. 'Allowing, through negligence, people to lie in prison for decades is unacceptable, and it requires moral leadership from the Government to revitalise the CCRC's purpose,' he says. What was a critical part of Britain's criminal justice system has been mismanaged into a mere quango. In the meantime, three innocent men – Sullivan, Malkinson and Nealon – served 70 years between them for crimes they did not commit.
After Sullivan was released, a CCRC spokesman said: 'As the Court of Appeal heard today, the new DNA evidence that has led to Mr Sullivan's conviction being quashed could not have been available when we first considered his case, and that the decision made then not to send this case back to the courts in 2008 was the correct one.
'However, we do regret that we were not able to identify Mr Sullivan's conviction as a potential miscarriage of justice in our first review.
'Our purpose is to find, investigate and refer potential miscarriages of justice, and it is imperative that we continue to take opportunities offered by developments in scientific techniques to do that.
'As an organisation we are committed to taking forward learning from previous reviews and we continue to develop our understanding around forensic opportunities.'