Man wrongfully jailed for nearly 4 decades in UK, released
livan, who watched the hearing by video from Wakefield prison in northern England, said through his lawyer that he was not resentful and was anxious to see his loved ones. CNN reported.
“As god is my witness, it is said the truth shall take you free,” attorney Sarah Myatt read from a statement outside court. “It is unfortunate that it does not give a timescale as we advance towards resolving the wrongs done to me. I am not angry, I am not bitter.”
He was the longest-serving victim of a wrongful conviction in the U.K., Myatt said.
Sindall, 21, a florist who was engaged to be married, was returning home from a part-time job at a pub on a Friday night in August 1986 when her van ran out of fuel, police said. She was last seen walking along the road after midnight.
Her body was found about 12 hours later in an alley. She had been sexually assaulted and badly beaten.
Sexual fluid found on Sindall’s body could not be scientifically analyzed until recently. A test in 2024 revealed it wasn’t Sullivan, defense attorney Jason Pitter said.
“The prosecution case is that it was one person. It was one person who carried out a sexual assault on the victim,” Pitter said. “The evidence here is now that one person was not the defendant.”
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson did not challenge the appeal and said that if the DNA evidence had been available at the time of the investigation it was inconceivable that Sullivan would have been prosecuted.
Merseyside Police said it reopened the investigation as the appeal was underway and was “committed to doing everything” to find the killer.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which examines possible wrongful convictions, declined to refer Sullivan’s case to the appeals court in 2008 because it said testing at the time was unlikely to produce a DNA profile.
