The chief executive of the miscarriage of justice watchdog has been accused of attempting to “sanitise” an independent review into her organisation’s handling of the Andrew Malkinson case.
A review by Chris Henley KC found the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) missed multiple opportunities to help Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a 2003 stranger rape he did not commit.
Its chief executive, Karen Kneller, has been in senior roles at the organisation for two decades and leading legal figures believe her position is now “completely untenable”.
The CCRC’s part-time chair Helen Pitcher resigned on Tuesday saying she had been “scapegoated” over the case.
Kneller was director of casework when the CCRC undertook what Henley described as “very poor” work on Malkinson’s first application to overturn his conviction.
Henley’s review was published last July, more than six months after it was first handed to the CCRC. Sources told the Guardian that once Kneller saw a draft detailing a “catalogue of failures”, she pushed hard to make sure there was no suggestion that the problems in the handling of Malkinson’s case were systemic.
Sources said Kneller was behind a request to add introductory lines to the review wrongly claiming that Henley felt it would not be appropriate to draw wider conclusions about the CCRC from his work. Henley refused to allow this.
When asked about the issue, Henley told the Guardian: “It did seem to me that there was an attempt to downplay the seriousness of some of the findings and there was a very significant delay between the delivery of my report and its eventual publication.
“I provided my report to them in January and found it surprising and a little frustrating that it wasn’t published until towards the end of July. I found some of the justification for the delay a little unconvincing. It was obvious to me that their priority was for the report not to present the whole organisation as failing.”
Malkinson’s first application was rejected for the first time while Kneller was director of casework. Henley noted in his review that an early “lack of oversight and direction” was “a cause for real concern” in this application and that the case was sat on for three years before being wrongly rejected because caseworkers failed to get to grips with the DNA breakthrough.
Henley said he had been unaware while undertaking the review of Kneller’s role at the time as her name had not come up in the files. Had he known, Henley said he would have wanted to speak more to her.
He added: “If she was head of casework at the time there would be questions for her to answer about the lack of effective oversight,” he said.
A month before Malkinson’s exoneration, Kneller was given a 7.5% pay rise, including a bonus of up to £10,000. Last year she was awarded a further pay rise and another bonus, taking her pay to about £130,000, while Malkinson was struggling on benefits.
Malkinson said: “I’m furious that the person responsible for supervising the CCRC’s first botched review of my case went on to become the chief executive for all these years, and has been getting handsome bonuses while I’ve been scraping by.
“Karen Kneller’s alleged attempt to downplay Chris Henley’s findings shows she’s interested in damage limitation, not justice. She’s a key part of the rot at the CCRC and should be sacked.”
The CCRC spent more than £14,000 to bring in a leading crisis communications consultant in November 2023 to handle fallout from the review.
By the following July, when the report was still not published after months of the CCRC quibbling over edits in an apparent attempt to try to water it down, consultant Chris Webb sent a furious resignation letter, blasting the organisation for its approach to the review.
He is understood to have told Kneller that he had serious concerns about their response to the review and that it had failed to keep promises to Malkinson about sharing its contents. He felt that continuing to delay its publication put the commission and the chair’s reputation at risk and was frustrated that his advice had been ignored.
Webb is also understood to have expressed concern to colleagues about a conflict of interest that Kneller was the one making the decisions on the communications approach when she had been responsible for managing casework at the critical time.
Webb said: “Although I’m not going to disclose the content of a personal letter, I did have concerns about the approach that the CCRC had adopted in the handling of the Henley Report, which I could no longer support, and therefore decided to terminate my contract with them on 5 July.”
Matt Foot, co-director at the legal charity Appeal, which represented Malkinson, said: “Karen Kneller’s position as chief executive of the CCRC is now completely untenable. ”
A CCRC spokesperson said: “Mr Henley was commissioned by the CCRC to carry out a detailed review specifically into the organisation’s handling of Andrew Malkinson’s case. The report Mr Henley produced was made public last summer. It contained a number of recommendations, all of which were accepted and have been acted upon.
“The CCRC let Andrew Malkinson down and we have apologised to him for this.”
Pitcher said in a podcast interview with Joshua Rozenberg that she had been badly advised about the CCRC’s earlier handling of the case and that her “executive team felt nothing had gone wrong”. A CCRC spokesperson said they “do not recognise that interpretation of events”.
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”.
Henley said: “They still seem to be trying to spin it, trying to sanitise the whole thing rather than have an open and transparent review of wider lessons the organisation should be learning.”
A CCRC spokesperson said: “We have welcomed the clarity given by Mrs Pitcher’s decision to resign and look forward to working with an interim chair to find, investigate and refer to the appeal courts, possible miscarriages of justice.”
Kneller has been approached for comment.
