The British justice system has been rocked by a series of overturned convictions in recent years. /Andrew Aitchison/In pictures via Getty Images

A British man who spent 38 years in jail for the 1986 murder of a barmaid had his conviction quashed on Tuesday by a UK court after new DNA evidence came to light.

Peter Sullivan, 68, is thought to be the country's longest-serving victim of a miscarriage of justice after three judges overturned his conviction. He was arrested a month after Diane Sidwell, 21, was killed in August 1986 and found dead in Bebington, near the city of Liverpool in northwest England. 

Sullivan insisted in a statement read by his lawyer, that while his conviction was "very wrong" he was "not angry" or "bitter".

'Not the defendant'

Sullivan was convicted in 1987 and his attempts over the years to appeal the conviction failed. But on Tuesday his lawyers told the Court of Appeal that new evidence based on semen samples found on the victim's body showed the killer "was not the defendant."

Lawyers for the Crown Prosecution Service which brought the case against Sullivan said the new evidence meant there was "no credible basis on which the appeal can be opposed."

It was "sufficient fundamentally to cast doubt on the safety of the conviction," they added.

Sullivan appeared to weep as the judges overturned his sentence.

'Serious failings'

It's the latest in a series of miscarriages of justice overturned in the UK courts in recent decades.

In 2023 Andrew Malkinson, 57, was released after being wrongly convicted of rape and serving 17 years in jail. An official review found that Malkinson could have been exonerated almost a decade earlier if not for serious failings by officials.

The Post Office Horizon scandal which exploded into the British public consciousness after its TV dramatization last year has been described as the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice. More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing because of incorrect information from the Horizon computer system.

A report by justice charity Appeal a few months later said that at least 56 miscarriages of justice had occurred in cases in England and Wales where the jury was split, and recommended the reintroduction of jury unanimity rules. 

All eyes are now on the case of Jeremy Bamber who was convicted in 1986 of killing his parents, sister and her six-year-old twins in a case dubbed the ‘White House Farm murders’.

Bamber's legal representatives have submitted new evidence to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body responsible for sending alleged miscarriages of justice back to the court of appeal, which they insist prove his innocence.