Peter Sullivan, 68, has been released by an United Kingdom appeal court on Tuesday, after spending 38 years in prison. A new DNA test has ruled out that he committed the violation and murder of those who was accused in 1986. The exreo thus becomes the protagonist of the longest erroneous conviction of British justice.
Sullivan was arrested a month after Diane Sindall, 21, who attended the bar of a bar, was found dead in the town of Birkenhead. The woman had been the victim of sexual assault when she returned home. In 1987, the man was convicted, based on circumstantial evidence, to a permanent revisable penalty – with a minimum of 16 years – but ended up passing between bars almost four decades, after the courts rejected their resources twice.
It was not until 2021 when the commission for the review of criminal cases could verify that the DNA found in the crime scene did not coincide with that of Sullivan. These were semen remains of an attacker whose identity is still unknown today.
Sullivan has heard the decision of his release by videoconference, from prison. He has not been able to avoid exploding in sobs while covering his mouth with one hand.
The lawyer Duncan Atkinson, on behalf of the victim’s relatives and the Crown Prosecutor’s Office, had previously communicated to the three magistrates of the court that his clients agreed that the result of the new DNA tests had undermined Sullivan’s conviction, and that they had no intention of requesting a new trial.
“There is no evidence that they suggest that there was more than one man involved in this crime, nor are there to deduce that the semen found was the result of a consented sexual activity,” the sentence read the magistrate Timothy Holroyde. “In the light of the evidence collected, it is impossible to conclude that Mr. Sullivan’s conviction is firm,” he added.
The Merseyside Police, at the head of the investigation, has now committed to locate the person whose DNA remained in the crime scene, but has admitted at the same time that there is no concordance at the time in the national base of genetic databases. What they have been able to confirm is that the remains found do not correspond to any relative of the victim or who was his boyfriend during that time.
The police authorities assured the court, during the appeal hearing, which only thanks to a new technology had been possible to trace DNA of the semen remains found in the Sindall abdomen.
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