Victim of Britain's longest miscarriage of justice 'not angry' despite spending 38 years in jail
13 May 2025, 15:18
Peter Sullivan has said he is "not angry" and "not bitter" after the Court of Appeal quashed his murder conviction, making him the longest-serving victim of a miscarriage of justice in the UK.
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The now-68-year-old, who was jailed in 1987 for the murder of Diane Sindall and has since spent 38 years in prison, described what happened to him as "very wrong" but said the ruling did not "detract or minimise" a "heinous and most terrible loss of life".
Mr Sullivan was aged 30 when he was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 16 years after being found guilty of the 1986 murder of 21-year-old Ms Sindall in Bebington, Merseyside, but remained in prison for almost four decades.
On Tuesday, three senior judges quashed his conviction after his case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, following new DNA evidence.
It follows two previous attempts to overturn the conviction, the first of which came in 2008.
In their ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde, sitting with Mr Justice Goss and Mr Justice Bryan, said the new evidence meant it was "impossible to regard the appellant's conviction as safe", while offering condolences to Ms Sindall's loved ones.
In a statement read out by his solicitor following the judgment, Mr Sullivan said: "What happened to me was very wrong, but it does not detract or minimise that all of this happened off the back of a heinous and most terrible loss of life."
He continued: "I'm not angry, I'm not bitter."
Speaking to reporters outside the court in London, Mr Sullivan's sister, Kim Smith, said: "We lost Peter for 39 years and at the end of the day it's not just us, Peter hasn't won and neither has the Sindall family. They've lost their daughter, they are not going to get her back.
"We've got Peter back, and now we've got to try and build a life around him again.
"We feel sorry for the Sindalls, and it's such a shame this has had to happen in the first place."
Mr Sullivan, who is now set to be released from prison, attended the hearing via video link from HMP Wakefield and wept and held his head in his hands as his conviction was quashed.
Ms Sindall had been returning home from work as a barmaid when she was beaten to death and sexually assaulted, with her body left partially clothed and mutilated.
During the hearing, lawyers for Mr Sullivan told the court that the new evidence showed that Ms Sindall's killer "was not the defendant".
Barristers for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told the court that there was "no credible basis on which the appeal can be opposed" related to the DNA evidence, as it was "sufficient fundamentally to cast doubt on the safety of the conviction".
Mr Sullivan first applied to the CCRC in 2008 over concerns related to DNA evidence, but it did not refer the sentence to the Court of Appeal at that time.
The CCRC said in November last year that experts at the time had advised that "any further testing would be very unlikely to produce a DNA profile", with Lord Justice Holroyde stating on Tuesday that this decision was "plainly correct".
Mr Sullivan then had an appeal bid, which did not involve the CCRC, dismissed by the Court of Appeal in 2019, after judges ruled that bite mark evidence used in the challenge was not central to the prosecution at trial.
He then applied to the CCRC again in 2021 to refer his case, raising concerns over police interviews, bite mark evidence used during his trial, and the murder weapon.
The CCRC said that, as well as new DNA evidence, there was "also evidence to suggest there were possible breaches of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984" concerning the interviews, with Mr Sullivan not provided with an appropriate adult and initially denied legal representation.
Duncan Atkinson KC, for the Crown Prosecution Service, told the Court of Appeal that the new DNA evidence, analysed by three forensic scientists, "could not have been available" at his trial or when the CCRC first considered the case.
Mr Atkinson continued that analysis of the DNA showed that it came from someone known as "unknown male one", and that it was "one billion times more likely that the sample originated from unknown male one, rather than someone else, and it did not match the appellant".
