Inside HMP Wakefield, the place Peter Sullivan was wrongly held for homicide | EUROtoday

Appearing on the Court of Appeal through videolink from HMP Wakefield, Peter Sullivan wept and held his head in his arms as he was acquitted of a homicide which has seen him spend 38 years in jail.

The ruling on Tuesday is assumed to have confirmed the 68-year-old because the sufferer of the longest-running miscarriage of justice in British historical past.

Mr Sullivan was aged 30 when he was sentenced to life with a minimal time period of 16 years, after being discovered responsible of the 1986 homicide of 21-year-old Diane Sindall in Bebington, Merseyside. Ms Sindall had been returning dwelling from work as a barmaid when she was crushed to demise and sexually assaulted, along with her physique left partially clothed and mutilated.

On Tuesday, three senior judges quashed his conviction after new DNA proof noticed the Criminal Cases Review Commission refer him again to the Court of Appeal, following two earlier makes an attempt to overturn his conviction, the primary of which got here in 2008.

The BBC reported that Mr Sullivan left West Yorkshire’s HMP Wakefield in a jail van shortly after 2:15pm on Tuesday, having spent a complete of 14,113 days in custody.

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Nicknamed “Monster Mansion”, HMP Wakefield – a class A jail, and one among only a handful which homes a close-supervision centre – has been dwelling to a number of the nation’s most infamous inmates.

Those embrace former Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, who was jailed for 29 years in December 2013, after admitting a string of intercourse offences – together with the tried rape of a fan’s child. In 2023, he was reported to have been stabbed after being taken hostage by different inmates.

Charles Bronson, one of many UK’s longest-serving prisoners, has additionally spent a few years at HMP Wakefield. In 2017, he married the late actor Paula Williamson on the jail. Three years earlier he was convicted of attacking governor Alan Parkins, whereas in 2018 he was cleared of allegedly assaulting his successor Mark Doherty.

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Robert Maudsley, a killer recognized throughout the jail system as “Hannibal the Cannibal” can be housed at Wakefield, the place he’s reported to have killed two fellow inmates inside weeks of being despatched there in 1978. He is assumed to have spent extra time in solitary confinement than anybody else on document.

Notorious killer Harold Shipman, a former GP convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 sufferers, died by suicide in HMP Wakefield in 2004. Colin Ireland, a serial killer who was convicted in 1993 after torturing 5 homosexual males to demise within the area of three months, additionally died on the jail in 2012, reportedly from pulmonary fibrosis.

Other former inmates embrace Ian Huntley, who was convicted in 2003 of the homicide of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and infamous serial killer Levi Bellfield, who was attacked by a fellow inmate at Wakefield in 2009.

Housing round 740 inmates, Wakefield was initially inbuilt 1594 as a “house of correction”. While it was designated one among seven new “dispersal prisons” in 1966, in response to 5 high-profile escapes, most of its buildings reportedly date again to the Victorian period.

At the time of its most up-to-date inspection in late 2022, almost all the prisoners held had been serving over 10 years and almost half had been serving indeterminate sentences, together with life and now discredited IPP sentences. Around 60 per cent of all inmates at the moment had been convicted of significant sexual offences.

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Inspectors stated on the time: “Wakefield is an old establishment, with most wings resembling the traditional galleried institution familiar to the public mind. Some aspects of the prison’s infrastructure were showing their age, but in general the prison was clean and well-maintained, and nearly all prisoners were housed in individual and well-resourced cells.”

Wakefield has 4 residential wings – A, B, C and D – and almost all cells on the jail are of single occupancy, in accordance with the jail’s Independent Monitoring Board (IMB).

The predominant amenities embrace kitchens, snooker and pool tables, a fitness center, a library, an exterior train space and sports activities subject, a chapel, training areas, and a number of workplaces.

Judging security, respect and rehabilitation on the jail to be “reasonably good”, inspectors stated in 2022 that they discovered inadequate requirements solely within the high quality of purposeful exercise supplied to prisoners. But they famous: “In the context of the times and challenges faced by the prison system, this is one of the better inspections we have undertaken at an adult male prison recently.”

However, of their newest annual report, volunteers on the IMB warned in February of a decline in security on the notorious jail, with a 123 per cent enhance within the variety of prisoner assaults on employees, which totalled 136 previously 12 months.

While inspectors praised the standard of prisoner-staff relationships in 2022 as a “continuing strength of the prison”, the IMB warned in February {that a} nationwide effort to shore up recruitment gaps at struggling prisons – largely within the south – utilizing extra skilled officers at Wakefield and different northern jails was hampering ranges of expertise on the jail.

That criticism got here after The Independent revealed that the usage of this tactic to “paper over the cracks” of the jail staffing disaster had soared by almost 350 per cent within the area of simply 4 years, at a price to the taxpayer of £16.2m in 2023 alone.