Paul Quinn is being sentenced at Manchester Crown Court for the 2003 rape, strangulation and grievous bodily harm of a young mother in Salford, Greater Manchester, the attack that led to Andrew Malkinson spending 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Quinn was found guilty in April after a trial that finally tied him to the assault through DNA.
The sentencing matters now because it closes the criminal case around an attack that was left hanging over both the victim and the man wrongly blamed for it for years. Quinn was arrested in 2022 after DNA testing produced a billion-to-one match with saliva left on the victim's top, a finding that came long after Malkinson had been picked out at a police identity parade, released in 2020 and had his conviction quashed in 2023.
The woman at the centre of the case has described the lasting impact in painful terms, saying she lives in constant fear that someone is behind her and that one night changed her life. In court, Mr Justice Bright said Quinn pounced when she reached a bridge, had been following her for at least 0.9 miles along a route that took 16 minutes to walk, and waited for what he called the perfect moment and the perfect point in the road.
He said Quinn bundled her off the road down a steep embankment to a point out of sight, took her phone when she tried to use it to get help and strangled her until she thought she was going to die and passed out. Two witnesses later told the court they saw the victim and a man following her twice, with the first sighting placing Quinn about 30 seconds behind her. Bright described the victim as a remarkable person and a hero for giving evidence after what she endured.
The case has always carried that double weight: one brutal assault and one catastrophic failure of justice. Quinn's sentence now brings the court's work on the attack to its final step, but it also leaves the wider question of how a man could spend 17 years in prison after being identified in a police parade while the real attacker remained free until DNA linked him to the scene.
