Man Found Guilty in Rape Case That Wrongly Jailed Andrew Malkinson

Paul Quinn was unanimously convicted at Manchester Crown Court in the rape and violent assault of a woman in Little Hulton, Salford, a case that kept Andrew Malkinson behind bars for 17 years before the wrongful conviction was overturned. The verdict brought a criminal case that began with a brutal attack near the M61 on 19 July 2003 back to the center of public scrutiny.

A jury found Quinn, 52, guilty of two counts of rape, one count of choking with intent and one count of grievous bodily harm after a six-week trial. Quinn, who now lives in Exeter, had been living in Little Hulton at the time of the attack. The renewed prosecution was built on the victim’s account, eyewitness evidence and later enquiries into Quinn’s phone history, along with DNA material that investigators said eventually tied him to the crime.

Greater Manchester Police said the case was reopened in 2022 after samples from the original investigation, which had returned no forensic hits at the time, produced a match to Quinn. Officers said a full DNA profile matching Quinn was found on the victim’s vest top. Police also said Quinn tried to explain away the DNA evidence. The force described him as a convicted sex offender.

The original investigation in the summer of 2003 wrongly led to the arrest and prosecution of Andrew Malkinson, who served 17 years in prison before clearing his name at the Court of Appeal in 2023. Malkinson was released in December 2020, but his conviction was not quashed until fresh DNA analysis pointed to a different suspect. The long gap between the 2003 inquiry and the eventual identification of Quinn exposed how a failure in forensic review can harden into a wrongful conviction that lasts for decades.

The verdict has now intensified attention on the institutions that examined the case after Malkinson’s release. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, Greater Manchester Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and an independent inquiry have all looked at what went wrong in the first investigation and why the true attacker was not identified sooner. Greater Manchester Police said the wrong man had been jailed and apologized to both the victim and Malkinson.

For Malkinson, the conviction of Quinn closes one part of a long case but not the larger question it raised: how a serious rape investigation, a missed DNA match and years of institutional failure left an innocent man in prison while the real offender remained free.