The authority that investigates miscarriages of justice has serious questions to answer

Editorial: Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in jail for a rape he didn’t commit. So why did the Criminal Cases Review Commission take so long to clear him – when they had the evidence that would prove his innocence?

The truly frightening thing about Mr Malkinson’s case is that he was lucky (PA)

Any journalist who has tried to report a miscarriage of justice case knows how difficult they can be. Until the accused has been formally exonerated by a court, there are always doubts about the evidence. Our prisons are full of criminals volubly and sometimes convincingly protesting their innocence.

So we do not pretend that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has an easy task. Yet in the case of Andrew Malkinson, the man who served 17 years for a rape he did not commit, it ran out of excuses for its failings long ago.

As Nazir Afzal writes for The Independent in a powerful article today, the case against Mr Malkinson had fallen apart in 2007, and yet he spent another 13 years in prison after that. Mr Afzal, the former chief crown prosecutor for North West England, writes that this wrongful conviction “has been uncovered in spite of the mechanisms set up to carry out this task, not because of them”.