A sex offender has been found guilty of a rape which saw an innocent man jailed for 17 years.
Paul Quinn, 52, had denied the attack on a woman in Little Hulton, Salford in 2003 for which Andrew Malkinson was wrongly convicted.
Jurors at Manchester Crown Court heard the father-of-six’s DNA was found on the woman’s vest and he had searched online to see how long police kept samples.
Quinn, of Exeter, Devon, and formerly of Little Hulton, Salford, was also found guilty of strangulation and grievous bodily harm.
Warning: This story contains distressing details.
The court heard Quinn, a sex offender from the age of 12, attacked the young mother as she walked home in the Salford suburb in the early hours of the morning on 19 July 2003.
She was brutally beaten, bitten and her cheekbone was fractured.
Quinn then strangled her unconscious and raped her.
Malkinson, who was working as a security guard at a local shopping centre, had protested his innocence but was wrongly picked out at as the attacker in an identity parade.
He was jailed in 2004.
Speaking after Quinn’s conviction, Malkinson said he was “content that the right result has finally been achieved for the victim, myself and the public”.
“But the truth is that if the police had acted as they should have done, Paul Quinn could have been caught a long time ago,” he said.
“Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime.”
Malkinson, from Grimsby, made multiple failed appeals against his conviction in 2012 and 2020.
Now aged 60, he was only released in 2020 after 17 years in jail, with his conviction finally quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2023.
Assistant Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Steph Parker said: “The fact that Andrew Malkinson was imprisoned for 17 years for a crime he didn’t commit is clearly a failing of Greater Manchester Police, and the wider criminal justice system.
“And for that, we are absolutely sorry.
“We are determined that this cannot happen again and we also offer our apologies to the victim, who we’ve let down.”
The Independent Office for Police Conduct said GMP’s handling of the case was still under investigation.
Five former GMP officers and one currently serving with the force are under investigation by the IOPC.
Quinn was arrested almost two decades after Malkinson was wrongly jailed, following advances in DNA testing which meant in 2022 a billion-to-one match of his DNA profile was made with saliva left on the victim’s vest top.
The court heard Quinn was a convicted sex offender at the time of the attack.
He was cautioned in 1986 for two counts of indecent assault against a female, when he was 12 years old.
In November 1992, he was convicted of two counts of underage sex, an offence which today would be classified as rape. He was aged 16 and the girl was 12 at the time of the offences.
It was this offence that led to his DNA being taken by police ten years later, which ultimately linked him to the rape in 2003.
A statement read on behalf of the victim said “two lives had been impacted” by the case.
It had “robbed me of the life I wanted to have” and the miscarriage of justice had “robbed Mr Malkinson of 17 years”, she said.
However, she said “justice has been served” by this verdict.
The six-week trial heard Quinn stalked his victim, in her 30s, as she walked home, dragging her from the street down a motorway embankment.
He battered her, fracturing her cheekbone, and she was strangled unconscious and twice raped.
He also bit her left nipple, almost severing it, but left behind on her vest top his saliva from which his DNA was recovered years later.
‘Alarm bells’
Parker added: “Paul Quinn is a dangerous man. He is the one responsible for this horrific attack, and he has known it all along for more than 20 years.
“The harm he has done to the victim and the cowardice of watching the wrong man go to prison for his crime is unforgivable.”
When the victim gave evidence against Malkinson in 2003 she had doubts she had picked out the right man, but police dismissed this as “just trial nerves”.
The DNA sample from the vest top, only recovered and identified in 2007, was analysed and ruled out Malkinson, which was a development which “ought to have set alarm bells ringing”, the court heard.
Quinn had given a DNA sample in 2012, as police collected samples from known sex offenders.
In August 2022, after testing became more advanced, news broke that police had matched the vest top DNA sample to another man.
The trial heard that this development had a “profound” effect on Quinn’s internet usage.
Quinn told jurors it was a “complete coincidence” he had begun scouring the news for information on the Malkinson case and repeatedly searched Google, asking: “How long is DNA kept in database”, and, “Why do I keep sweating all the time…”
He also searched up “wrongful convictions” in the UK.
Quinn, who divorced in 2016, had moved from Salford following a drugs dispute, the court heard.
He was arrested in December 2022 after moving to Exeter, where he was working as a delivery driver.
