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Sean Hodgson - Source: Reuters -
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A British court has cleared a man of a murder conviction for which he had spent 27 years in prison.
The Court of Appeal ruled Sean Hodgson's conviction for the murder of a 22-year-old barmaid was "unsafe" and should be quashed in the light of DNA evidence unavailable at the time of his 1982 trial.
Outside court, a frail-looking Hodgson, 57, said he was "ecstatic" to have been cleared.
Teresa De Simone was found in 1979 raped and strangled in her car in a car park below the bar where she worked in the southern coastal town of Southampton.
Hodgson, who had been in the area at the time, was convicted on the basis of confessions he made but later retracted and on a match of common blood types. DNA testing did not appear in court trials in Britain until 1986.
Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge said DNA analysis of sperm taken from De Simone's body had shown it did not come from Hodgson, the Press Association reported.
"The Crown's case was that whoever raped her also killed her, so the new DNA evidence has demolished the case for the prosecution," Judge said.
Hodgson, originally from County Durham, had said he had confessed because he was a pathological liar. He has since suffered from mental illness.
Police have reopened the investigation into De Simone's death. Hodgson, who denied the charge at his trial, had served such a long time behind bars because he had continued to insist on his innocence, effectively ruling out parole, his lawyer Julian Young said.
Another man, Stephen Downing also served 27 years, for the murder of a Derbyshire typist, before his conviction was quashed in 2002.
State prosecutors said they were considering a proposal to review all similar murder cases in which convictions were made before DNA evidence was available.
