Hodgson walks free after 27 years

Sean Hodgson, who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, walked free from court yesterday after it was disclosed that a "disgraceful" forensics error prevented his release 11 years ago.

Speaking on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice in London Hodgson was "ecstatic to be free again" after his release which marked the end of one of the longest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

He had been convicted of killing 22-year-old barmaid Teresa De Simone who was raped and strangled in her Ford Escort in a car park behind the Tom Tackle pub in Southampton in December 1979.

Hodgson had pleaded his innocence after retracting a confession initially given to a Roman Catholic priest – one of hundreds of crimes to which he confessed because, as he told his original trial, he was a "pathological liar".

His conviction was quashed because new DNA analysis of original samples taken from the murder scene - which was not available at the time - proved that he could not have been the killer.

However, it emerged that when his lawyers had first asked for new tests on samples from the sceme to be undertaken in 1998 they were wrongly told the case material no longer existed.

Hodgson's family are now Forensic Science Service.