TV Pick of the Week: The Wrong Man: 17 Years Behind Bars - review by Yvette Huddleston
In the summer of 2003 Andrew Malkinson, who was then in his late thirties, was arrested for the brutal rape of a 33-year-old mother of two in Salford. Despite protesting his innocence, he was then plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare from which he only emerged nearly twenty years later.
Malkinson’s story is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the past two decades and this powerful, sobering and often upsetting documentary charts the long struggle that this innocent man had to go through in order to clear his name. It also highlights catastrophic failings by the Greater Manchester Police and the criminal justice system.
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Hide AdMalkinson was positively identified in a police lineup by the victim and also by two members of the public who claimed to have seen him near the location of the attack. Seemingly that was enough for the case to go to court where a jury found him guilty and he was sentenced by a judge to life imprisonment. At every point he insisted he was innocent and couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He then descended into what he describes as “a parallel nightmare world.”
He was put in the terrible catch-22 position of not being eligible for parole because he, understandably, felt unable to take part in restorative sessions in which he was expected to talk in detail about and express remorse for a crime he did not commit. As a consequence, he was labelled a liar and deemed to be ‘in denial’. One of the most shocking revelations is the mistakes, and worse, that were made by the police both in their original investigation and later when new evidence came to light that would have proved Malkinson’s innocence.
Finally, a glimmer of hope arrived when the organisation Appeal, a charity and law practice dedicated to challenging wrongful convictions, took on his case. Through their careful, dogged research and investigation, including taking the police to court to get access to evidence, Malkinson’s case – which had been rejected twice by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) – went to appeal.
As Malkinson expressed in his eloquent, dignified statement outside the Royal Courts of Justice in July 2023, after finally being exonerated, apologies are not enough, the damage has been done and it continues to impact his life. At the documentary’s close we are left with the sense that he may never be truly free again.