Man falsely imprisoned for 17 years forced to use food banks
A man who was wrongly jailed for 17 years says he relies on a foodbank to survive as he has not been paid any compensation.
Andrew Malkinson was wrongly jailed for raping a woman while working as a security guard in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2003.
But he says he has not been paid a penny he is owed by the state after he was released in July last year.
Instead of starting his life, the 57-year-old lives in limbo as he navigates the compensation system.
He wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian: ‘This week I found myself in line at the local food bank. I feel so grateful to the people who so generously stocked my kitchen for the week, but at the same time, given what the state owes me, I should not be in this position.’
Mr Malkinson is reportedly forced to pay back £5 a month of his universal credit ‘for what it considered an overpayment,’
It comes after he left the UK for more than 28 days to fulfill his ‘long-held dream’ of travel, the Guardian reports.
After being freed, he was homeless and lived in a tent in Seville, Spain, as he could not ‘bear’ to be in Britain after his experience.
Now he lives in southern England in a one-bedroom council flat with his lawyer’s cocker spaniel Basil.
When he was declared free last summer, he was also ‘an impoverished man,’ he wrote in the outlet.
‘I was living on universal credit, homeless and in urgent need of mental health support from clinicians who would at last recognise the enormity of what I had been through for the last 20 years,’ he wrote.
He said how the news after his release made it sound like he was due a huge payout to ‘make sure I could own a home, make up lost time, and secure the support I needed for my mental health.’
To make matters worse, Mr Malkinson was told he now faces a five-month wait on the NHS to receive mental health support.
He was previously removed from the NHS waiting list after he had weekly counselling with a charity, according to the outlet.
Throughout his time in prison, Mr Malkinson maintained his innocence.
His conviction was quashed by senior judges at the Court of Appeal after DNA evidence linked another man to the crime.
He said previously he was ‘enraged’ after reports he may have his prison accommodation costs cut from the compensation when he eventually gets paid.
‘Nothing but barriers’
Previously talking to BBC Breakfast, Mr Malkinson said the state ‘have the power to do the right thing but they chose to take their time.’
Trying to access compensation he was ‘encountering nothing but barriers’ because of the law, he told the Guardian.
It means he has to choose whether to take an interim payment under the statutory compensation scheme now and risk losing legal aid he needs to sue the police later.
He also said the government had promised to reform the issue later in the year.
Mr Malkinson said another barrier is the requirement to fight a civil claim through the courts before being compensated through the statutory scheme, although he was told this should not apply.
He also criticised the refusal to adjust the cap on compensation of £1,000,000 ‘despite it not increasing with inflation since it was first introduced in December 2008,’ he wrote.
He claimed that those who designed the compensation scheme a decade ago were ‘paranoid’ and ‘labouring under the delusion that the state was somehow being consistently ripped off by prisoners whose convictions had been quashed.’
Mr Malkinson is advocating for an overhaul of the justice system, including reform of the jury system to ban majority verdicts like the one that wrongly convicted him, he told the Guardian.
After Greater Manchester Police issued an apology following the Court of Appeal ruling, he told the BBC Newsnight it was ‘meaningless.’
‘An apology without accountability, what is that? It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it means nothing,’ he said.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson told Metro.co.uk in a statement: ‘Andrew Malkinson suffered an atrocious miscarriage of justice which is why the Lord Chancellor has launched an inquiry into what happened, has scrapped the ‘saved living costs’ deduction from compensation and is changing legal aid rules so this form of compensation may be discounted from eligibility criteria.
‘Mr Malkinson is free to apply to the Miscarriage of Justice Application Service for compensation and this will not affect or delay his plans to sue the police.’
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