Prisoner cleared of murder after 27 years

By Tim Castle

LONDON (Reuters) - The appeal court cleared a man on Wednesday who has spent 27 years behind bars for murder, in one of Britain's longest cases of wrongful imprisonment.

The Lord Chief Justice and two other judges ruled that Sean Hodgson's conviction for the murder of a 22-year-old barmaid was unsafe in the light of DNA evidence unavailable at the time of his 1982 trial.

Hodgson, 57, had denied the charge in court at the time and has always since insisted on his innocence.

Teresa De Simone was found in 1979 raped and strangled in her Ford Escort in a car park below the Southampton pub where she worked.

Hodgson, who had been in the area at the time, was convicted on the basis of confessions he made but later retracted and a match of common blood types.

DNA testing did not appear in court trials until 1986.

Lord 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.