Andrew Malkinson has called for the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission to resign as the key role she held during the organisation’s most problematic handling of his case was revealed.
Karen Kneller was director of casework when the miscarriages of justice body did “very poor” work on Malkinson’s first application to overturn his conviction for a 2003 stranger rape he did not commit.
Kneller was promoted to chief executive in 2012, shortly after Malkinson’s application was rejected for the first time. Last year she was awarded a bonus and pay rise while Malkinson was struggling with unemployment after spending 17 years in prison.
A review published this week found that Malkinson could have been exonerated almost a decade earlier if the CCRC had properly understood the significance of new DNA evidence when he first applied.
Malkinson said: “If accountability means anything, it means [Kneller] has to go, as does the rest of the CCRC’s leadership team who have presided over an organisation that is simply not doing its job.”
While Chris Henley KC’s review contained personal criticism of the watchdog’s chair, Helen Pitcher, for failing to apologise and for “taking too little responsibility,” Kneller’s role has not been examined.
A source at the CCRC said: “She was director of casework at the time that the first decision took place, which is where it all went badly wrong, and it just spiralled from there.”
Some believe Kneller has deliberately avoided issuing public statements, so that she is not in the line of fire for mistakes. The same source suggested this was a strategy: “That’s something she prefers not to do”.
The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said on Thursday that Henley’s report showed Pitcher was “unfit to fulfil her duties” and that she was seeking her removal. Pitcher hit back, telling the Guardian she was the “best person” for the job and had no plans to stand down.
A panel will now be convened to consider Pitcher’s position as chair. Only a chair can make a decision on the chief executive.
Malkinson said: “I am deeply disturbed to learn that Karen Kneller, the person who was in charge of casework when my case was first rejected, and who must shoulder her share of responsibility for that, now actually runs the organisation as CEO.
“I find it particularly galling that she was given a bonus at a time when the CCRC well knew that they had made catastrophic errors in my case on her watch – while I was living on benefits.”
As chair, Pitcher’s role is part-time, equating to 10 days’ work a month. She said her insistence on staying in the job was because of her dedication to the cause. She told the Guardian: “I heard Andy say today on the news, you need someone in that top job who’s passionate about miscarriage of justice. Nobody is more passionate about it than I am.”
Malkinson said her comments were “jaw-dropping to me”.
Kneller has been in full-time leadership roles at the organisation for nearly 20 years.
Henley noted in his review that an early “lack of oversight and direction” was “a cause for real concern” in the handling of his first application in 2009, made while Kneller was responsible for casework.
He said the work was “very poor,” noting it took six months for Malkinson’s case to be assigned to anyone, and that when it was, no police file was requested. The application was then allowed to “drift” for more than a year before they left and a second case manager “reached firm conclusions far too quickly, without considering the material”.
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A month before Malkinson’s exoneration last year, Kneller was given a 7.5% pay rise to about £120,000, including a bonus of up to £10,000, according to CCRC paperwork.
Legal experts say Kneller has presided over a lost era for the organisation, with a focus on corporate goals rather than a zeal for uncovering miscarriages of justice.
A Westminster commission on miscarriages of justice in 2021 flagged concerns of a “risk that a target-driven culture prioritises speed over thoroughness” which “can compromise effective investigation”.
The former solicitor general, Lord Garnier, who co-chaired the commission, said: “I think the leadership as a whole needs changing. It’s got to be done from the top downwards. It’s not a question of fiddling around the edges.”
It is understood from former insiders that it was Kneller who became fixated on key performance indicators and a more corporate culture. Malkinson said: “Her misplaced focus on KPIs cost me 10 more years in prison.”
A former commissioner at the CCRC, David Jessel, said: “It needs a wholesale change in attitude in the chief executive as well as the chairman, where you are not looking at KPIs governing time spent on cases. That means there’s a strong disincentive to go out, interview applicants, commission new independent forensic work and so on – all the things the commissioners used to encourage them to do.”
There are also concerns that Kneller is too close to the criminal justice system to hold it to account. She joined the CCRC in 2005 having worked as a barrister for the Crown Prosecution Service.
Malkinson’s lawyer, Emily Bolton, said that Appeal, the charity she founded, had been working on cases before the CCRC for the past decade and “had case after case rejected after cursory reviews by that body. Over the same period the CCRC’s rate of sending cases back to the court of appeal has sometimes even fallen below 1%.”
A CCRC spokesperson said: “Our chief executive is responsible for the operations and management of our organisation. She leads the CCRC team as it carries out its difficult, challenging work.
“Everyone in the CCRC team is passionate about finding, investigating and referring miscarriages of justice.”
“In our 27-year history we have dealt with more than 30,000 applications, resulting in more than 840 referrals to the appeal courts, with two in three of those being successful. Hundreds of people have seen their convictions quashed because of a referral by the CCRC.
“Mr Henley’s report, which was commissioned by the CCRC, shows that we failed Mr Malkinson, and we are deeply sorry for that. Work to implement Mr Henley’s recommendations is under way.”
