Is Peter Sullivan the victim of the ‘longest-running’ miscarriage of justice in UK history?
Following this week’s exoneration of Peter Sullivan, who spent almost 38 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, many newspapers and media outlets said the case was thought to be the “longest-running” miscarriage of justice in UK history.
While this claim is true in some respects, it could do with some additional context.
Data from the miscarriages of justice registry at the University of Exeter, the largest database of wrongful convictions in the UK, shows that Mr Sullivan spent more time in prison before being exonerated than any other person in the database. However, others have had to wait even longer for justice, or died before their names could be cleared.
A notable case is that of Mahmood Mattan, who received a death sentence and was executed in 1952 after being wrongly convicted of the murder of a shopkeeper. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1998, some 46 years later.
It also took 46 years for Derek Bentley’s conviction to be quashed, after he was executed in 1953 for his part in the murder of a police officer the previous year.
Perhaps the person with the longest wait for exoneration in the UK is Winston Trew, a member of the so-called ‘Oval Four’, who was convicted of assaulting a police officer in 1972. Initially jailed for two years, he ultimately spent eight months behind bars. The evidence against him and several others was subsequently found to have been fabricated by a police officer who was later convicted of corruption.
Mr Trew, who is now in his seventies, had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in December 2019, 47 years later.
A BBC article originally omitted this case, claiming it was Mr Bentley that had waited the longest for his miscarriage of justice to be recognised. After being contacted by Full Fact, the article has been clarified.
How common are miscarriages of justice?
The government does not provide a figure for the number of cases sent to the Court of Appeal, but a 2020 Freedom of Information request found 916 applications for leave to appeal against conviction were received by the criminal division of the court between June 2019 and March 2020.
To give some sense of the scale of cases dealt with by the courts compared to appeals, in England and Wales during 2023, magistrates’ courts closed 1.34 million cases and Crown courts disposed of 99,000.
One potential indicator of the scale of the issue is data from the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), a body set up in 1995 after some high-profile miscarriages of justice from the mid-1970s were overturned in the late 1980s. These included the cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.
From April 1997 up to March 2025, the CCRC received 33,155 referrals. Of these, 844 were heard by the appeal courts and 592 convictions were overturned. Of the remainder, 234 appeals were denied and 18 were abandoned by the applicants before a decision was reached.