The rape case that became one of Britain’s greatest miscarriages of justice

Paul Quinn’s conviction, 23 years after the attack, exposes how a victim was repeatedly failed and an innocent man wrongly jailed One of Britain’s most shocking miscarriages of justice began before dawn on a summer day in Salford more than 20 years ago. A young woman had walked the darkened streets alone for about five miles when she was honked at, wolf-whistled and was so frightened she hid for a while in undergrowth. “I’m so scared,” she texted her sleeping boyfriend at 4.26am when she heard a man order her to get into the bushes “cause he had a gun pointing to my head”. After enduring this ugly harassment from three different men, the third went on to brutally rape her. The attack was so vicious she passed out from strangulation. Her left cheekbone was fractured and left nipple partly severed from a bite. When she dragged herself into the road, sliding in and out of consciousness, people drove past ignoring her cries for help. The young woman was failed on that harrowing morning in 2003 – and let down again and again over the next two decades by almost every official body responsible for getting her justice. She was forced to relive the experience again last mont