Andrew Malkinson has said the miscarriage of justice watchdog needs to be “completely dissolved” as it has become “infected with a culture of denial”.
Speaking to the Guardian after the resignation of the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, Helen Pitcher, Malkinson said the organisation should be dismantled.
An independent review last year found that the watchdog missed multiple opportunities to help Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a 2003 stranger rape he did not commit. His conviction was overturned by the court of appeal in 2023.
Malkinson said of the CCRC’s leadership: “They need to all go. Pitcher was right, it’s not just her, it’s the entire culture. They’ve become infected with a culture of denial.”
He has still received no state compensation, despite applying for an interim payment. “I’m living on universal credit benefits … They’re not telling us anything and making us wait and it’s really, really difficult,” he said.
“I’m struggling with bills. I’ve got the heating on all the time because I can’t bear to be freezing cold and racking up big bills and it’s a bit silly. I’m claiming from the Department of Work and Pensions, a branch of the government, while another branch owes me upwards of a million pounds. What’s going on?”
Pitcher resigned on Tuesday afternoon after an independent panel ruled she was no longer fit to chair the organisation.
It is understood that the Ministry of Justice is now considering what the panel’s findings mean for Pitcher’s role as chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC). Pitcher said she intended to carry on in that post for another year until its conclusion, and “do whatever is right for the organisation”.
Malkinson said: “She’s not fit to perform any role in our justice system after the way she’s tried to portray herself as the victim in this situation.
“Really, she never should have been chairing both the body that says who gets to be a judge and the outfit responsible for rooting out wrongful convictions. That was a clear conflict of interest – the one thing all miscarriages of justice have in common is that there was a judge presiding over them.”
Charlie Falconer, a former justice secretary under Tony Blair, told the Times that Pitcher’s position chairing the body which selects judges was “no longer tenable”, while the former solicitor-general Lord Garnier said confidence in Pitcher’s judgment was “eroding week by week”. The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, also called for Pitcher to stand down from her role on the JAC.
In his review of the CCRC’s handling of Malkinson’s case, Chris Henley KC made personal criticism of Pitcher for failing to apologise and for “taking too little responsibility” for the organisation’s failings. Pitcher was a part-time figurehead of the organisation and not there when the most problematic early decisions were made in Malkinson’s case, but it had been up to her to hold the chief executive to account and make public apologies.
In her resignation letter to the justice secretary, Pitcher said she had been “scapegoated” for Malkinson’s case – and compared herself to Henry Staunton, who was sacked by Kemi Badenoch as chairman of the Post Office because “someone has to take the rap”.
But Malkinson said Pitcher bore a closer resemblance to Paula Vennells, the much-criticised chief executive who had presided over the Post Office Horizon software scandal.
In a podcast interview released on Wednesday morning, Pitcher said she had first considered resignation after the Malkinson case when it became clear that she was not getting a pay rise when her commissioners were. She said she felt this indicated she no longer had the confidence of the then justice secretary, Alex Chalk.
The Guardian revealed Pitcher had been in Montenegro promoting her property business when her organisation was in crisis over its handling of the case. She only apologised on behalf of the body in April last year after seeing Henley’s review.
Comparing Pitcher and Vennells, Malkinson said: “There’s some parallels there,” and that they were more concerned with “their public image and their salaries, and how is this going to affect my holidays in Montenegro?”
Pitcher said Chalk had decided early on to make her a scapegoat. The former justice secretary is understood to have lost confidence in Pitcher after she appeared to have very little grasp of the detail of Malkinson’s case when they met after his conviction was quashed by the appeal court.
Pitcher said in a podcast interview with Joshua Rozenberg that she had been badly advised about the CCRC’s earlier handling of the case and there had been poor signal on a video call with Chalk. She said the Henley review was needed because “my executive team felt nothing had gone wrong, but something clearly had, and we needed to understand it and learn the lessons from it”.
The CCRC executive team is led by Karen Kneller, who was promoted to chief executive in 2012, shortly after Malkinson’s application was rejected for the first time. Kneller was the director of casework at a time when Henley found the miscarriages of justice body did “very poor” work on Malkinson’s first application to overturn his conviction.
Given Kneller’s history at the organisation, Malkinson said the body needed new executive leadership and to “refresh the whole thing, call it something else, completely dissolve it” so it could fulfil its original purpose of freeing up “innocent citizens who are languishing in Britain’s dungeons”.
Kim Johnson, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice, said Pitcher’s claims of being scapegoated were “both disingenuous and a deflection from the real issue at hand – her failure to adequately address miscarriages of justice during her tenure”. She said Pitcher’s departure underscored “the urgent need for reform within the CCRC”.
A spokesperson for the MoJ said it would appoint an interim chair “as quickly as possible, who will be tasked with conducting a full and thorough review of how the organisation operates”. They said the department was still in the process of considering Malkinson’s application for compensation.
A CCRC spokesperson said: “We do not recognise that interpretation of events. The CCRC let Andrew Malkinson down and we have apologised to him for this. We commissioned an external report on our handling of his case, which was made public last summer, and we are acting upon its recommendations.
“We welcome the clarity given by Mrs Pitcher’s decision to resign and look forward to working with an interim chair to find, investigate and refer to the appeal courts, possible miscarriages of justice.”
Source: theguardian.com
