Peter Sullivan weeps as UK court overturns murder conviction after 38 years

Sullivan, who was released after being exonerated by DNA evidence, said he was ‘not angry’ or ‘bitter’.

A man who spent nearly four decades in a British prison for the killing of a barmaid said he was not angry or bitter as his murder conviction was overturned and he was released after being exonerated by DNA evidence.

Peter Sullivan, 68, was freed after the court in London determined on Tuesday that new evidence found on the victim’s body showed that he “was not the defendant” of the murder.

“This is an unprecedented and historic moment. Our client Peter Sullivan is the longest-serving victim of a miscarriage of justice in the UK,” his lawyer told reporters outside the court on Tuesday following the decision issued by an appeals court.

Sullivan, who wept as the judges dismissed his conviction, said, in a statement read outside the court by his lawyer, that despite spending years in jail he was “not angry” or “bitter”.

“I lost my liberty four decades ago over a crime I did not commit,” he said.

Sullivan was arrested in 1986, a month after Diane Sindall, 21, was found dead in Bebington, near Liverpool in northwest England.

Sindall had been on the way home from work when she was attacked, sexually assaulted and beaten to death in a killing which shocked the area.

Sullivan was just 30 when he was convicted in 1987, and his two past attempts to appeal against his sentence failed.

In 2021, he applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission – an independent body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice, raising concerns about his police interviews, bite-mark evidence presented in his trial, and what was said to be the murder weapon, the commission said in a statement.

The commission then obtained DNA information from samples taken at the time of the offence and found that the profile did not match that of Sullivan. His case was then sent to London’s Court of Appeal.

Lawyers for the Crown Prosecution Service, which brought the case against Sullivan, said the new evidence meant there was “no credible basis on which the appeal can be opposed”.

It was “sufficient fundamentally to cast doubt on the safety of the conviction”, they added.

Detective Chief Superintendent Karen Jaundrill said police were now appealing for more information in a renewed bid to solve Sindall’s murder.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies