Andrew Malkinson rape conviction quashed after 20 years

Chris_Halkides said:
At Sub-stack Joshua Rozenberg reported on this matter. "Pitcher said this afternoon that, like a former Post Office chairman, she had been made to take the rap for the failures of others. In her resignation letter, she told the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood that Mahmood’s predecessor, Alex Chalk KC, had chosen to scapegoat her at an early stage. 'A head had to roll,' Pitcher said, “and I was chosen for that role.'...'The original rejection of Mr Malkinson’s appeal was almost a decade before my time: on my watch, armed with new DNA evidence which we commissioned, we were able to resolve the situation and set Mr Malkinson free…'". She has a point, but I am not totally buying into her arguments.
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I feel so sorry for her. It's almost as bad as if she had spent 17 years in jail for a heinous crime she didn't commit.
 
The Guardian reported, "Matt Foot, co-director of Appeal, said: “This is clearly the right decision and a real victory for those of us campaigning for an effective miscarriage of justice watchdog. Helen Pitcher proved herself an unfit leader when she shamelessly sought praise for her organisation’s catastrophic mishandling of Andrew Malkinson’s case and then spent months denying him an apology."

The Nealon case came before the Malkinson case; this is an indication that the latter was not a one-off incident. It would be a shame if the impetus for reform becomes dissipated by a single resignation.
 
The Guardian wrote, "Henley is concerned that the organisation is still trying to contain the implications of his review. In the CCRC’s latest annual report, it says twice that Henley’s 'findings are necessarily limited to the Andrew Malkinson case'". The review itself was apparently limited to the Malkinson case, but the very reason I brought up the Victor Nealon case in this thread was to help us all consider that the problems of the CCRC might well be systemic.

One might ask whether the phenomenon of regulatory capture has occurred. "The concept of Regulatory Capture (Reg Capture) typically refers to a phenomenon that occurs when a regulatory agency that is created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate an industry or sector the agency is charged with regulating. When regulatory capture occurs, the interests of firms or political groups are given priority or favor over the interests of the public."
 
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