A security guard aiming to quash a rape conviction that saw him serve 17 years behind bars has suggested other people have been wrongly imprisoned.
Andrew Malkinson, 57, will have his case heard at the Court of Appeal as he attempts to clear his name after new DNA evidence emerged pointing to another potential suspect.
He was found guilty of an attack in 2003 on a woman in Greater Manchester and the following year was jailed for life with a minimum term of seven years, but remained in prison for a further 10 because he maintained he was innocent.
A higher sentence served if you maintain innocence, even if you are innocent?
Yes, I grasp the point – life sentence, only those admitting guilt and showing remose should be let out on licence etc. And yet…..
Not to downplay, but a life sentence for rape seems a bit steep to me.
In fact it seems rather counterproductive to hand out the highest possible sentence for anything but the highest possible crimes. That might encourage criminals to reduce their risk of any sentence by reducing the number of witnesses.
I suppose the purpose of the life sentence is to blackmail the accused into signing that confession even if he’s innocent and thus prove that the crime has been solved.
He should be given lots of money. Whoever was responsible for the wrong conviction spend a commensurate time behind bars.
Seems fair.
“Whoever was responsible for the wrong conviction …”: what, all the members of the jury?
Do that and you’ll have a dreadful time finding jurors.
Whoever’s responsible could swap his salary for the past 17 years for the jail time. Then it won’t even be us taxpayers footing the bill.
Someone must have supplied some “evidence”. There’s the first candidate.
@dearieme: …all but 2 members of the jury; a fair proportion of the coverage reports a 10-2 verdict when he was convicted. Perhaps the dissident jury members should be given a chance to say “I told you so”.
dearime, i’m sure the jurors made the best decicision they could have done given the prosecution and defenses’ competence at manipulating lay people / bias / performance and schtik in the courtroom. And the ability / willingness of the Judge to be able to pick out the bollocks from either the defence of prosecution shysters and direct the jurors accordingly.
a life sentence for rape seems a bit steep
It seems rather inconsistent with the Scottish bloke escaping jail for raping an underage girl and the generally pathetic sentences handed out for multiple counts of rape and abuse by members of Muslim nonce gangs.
Perhaps the jury were misled:
“ Lord Justice Holroyde said other points argued by Mr Malkinson’s legal team, about “crucial” material that was not disclosed at the time of his trial, “raised a number of substantial and important points”.
He said the court would take time to consider them and give a decision on them later in writing.”
And he has a point here:
It doesn’t sound like a higher sentence.
It sounds like he was denied parole. Parole is not the end of your sentence, its just the part of it you can spend no locked in a cage.
@Chernyy Drakon – “He should be given lots of money.”
The way compensation should be calculated in cases like this is to find out how much money you would have to offer people to suffer the punishment and get 50% of them to accept the offer. Not that finding this out would be easy, of course.
In this case, it seems there was not malice or negligence which led to the conviction, just lack of evidence which eventually arose as a result of forensic advances. Though it does rather cast doubt on the “beyond reasonable doubt” principle.
Note the “Minimum Term”. Poor phuquer is lucky to get out at all.
@Aga
“It doesn’t sound like a higher sentence.
It sounds like he was denied parole”
Yeah, but Tim’s point stands too. People who maintain their innocence get a double whammy here. Those who plead guilty generally get a reduced sentence in the first place, so there’s essentially a longer sentence for the wrongly convicted. But once you’re in and trying to get out, maintaining your innocence makes it harder to demonstrate you’ve made any progress at confronting the causes of your offending and reducing your risk of offending in future. So you serve more of your (longer anyway) sentence behind bars.
@aga
Is it routine to sentence rapists to life tho?
I can kinda understand that for a multiple violent kiddy fiddler with zero prospect of reform, but a one-off?
It’s not routine to sentence rapists to life, but it’s possible. In this case the victim suffered an extremely violent attack which nearly killed her – the sentence was appropriate.
Eyewitness identification of strangers is unreliable. The police need that drumming into them.