Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. He was locked up in 2004 for rape, only to be cleared following the emergence of DNA evidence which showed his conviction was unsafe.
When I heard about the case, my blood ran cold. As a prosecutor for many years, I believed to my bootstraps in the importance of ensuring that trials were fair and convictions were safe. It underpins a prosecutor’s duty to the court.
To make matters worse for Mr Malkinson, it emerged that he was at risk of having any future compensation award slashed on the basis that his living expenses whilst in prison should be deducted. That struck me as fundamentally unfair. It surely cannot be right that victims of devastating miscarriages of justice, wrongly languishing in prison, should be penalised again in this way. It felt to me like a double injustice.
So over the weekend I intervened to scrap the rule with immediate effect.
From now on, victims receiving payments under the miscarriage of justice compensation scheme will not be liable for ‘board and lodging’ deductions. Those wrongly jailed for more than ten years will instead be entitled, subject to meeting the relevant statutory test, to an award of up to £1m with the final sum determined by an independent assessor.
That’s only right and fair.
But what about previous cases? I’ve looked into them, and am reassured to discover that no such deductions have been made in the last decade. Since 2006 when the relevant principle was established, there have been just three cases where the board and lodging deduction was applied. Of those three, the deductions were a relatively modest 3%, 3% and 6%.
Still, I will look at past cases carefully, and make a decision about what is fair in all the circumstances.
On my appointment as Lord Chancellor, I stated that my priorities for office were to ensure that the guilty were convicted, but also that the innocent walk free. Both matter equally. Andrew Malkinson’s case makes me feel more strongly about that than ever.
[Column published in the Cheltenham Post]