Will Peter Sullivan receive compensation and if so how much?

Peter Sullivan was freed in May after spending 38 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

The 68-year-old, has been described as the victim of Britain’s longest-running miscarriage of justice having been jailed in 1987 for murdering 21-year-old Diane Sindall in Birkenhead.

He was released when his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal earlier this year after new testing of preserved semen samples produced a DNA profile that pointed to another, unknown, man.

Will he receive compensation for being locked up for almost four decades and, if so, how much will he get?

No, not yet.

Sarah Myatt, who has been Mr Sullivan’s solicitor for more than 20 years, said: “It is a long process.

“We are helping him with that and representing him in terms of his application.

“How long that will take? I just don’t know at this stage. But it’s certainly not a quick process.”

The money comes from a statutory government scheme and the amount paid to people wrongly jailed for more than a decade in England and Wales is capped at £1.3m.

The cap, which was increased slightly from £1m earlier this year, is the most money that those people can receive from the Ministry of Justice.

The statutory cap for those wrongly imprisoned under a decade is £650,000.

Ms Myatt said she does not know exactly how much Mr Sullivan will be entitled to at this stage but said no figure would be satisfactory after what he had been through.

She said: “I’ve said before, no amount will be enough. It just won’t.

“There’s not a figure that you could say that would be enough for losing 38 years of your life. But no, we certainly don’t know at this stage.”

Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, has been campaigning to get the compensation scheme overhauled.

He served 17 years in prison for a rape he always denied.

He has described the government’s cap on pay-outs for victims of miscarriages of justice as “insulting” – after facing a series of complications and delays in receiving any support.

He vowed to “keep fighting to abolish this cruel and arbitrary cap, along with the brutal rules currently denying compensation to the vast majority of wrongfully convicted people”.

Mr Malkinson received an initial payment from the government in February.

The amount of compensation was not revealed, but The Guardian reported he was set to receive a “significant” six-figure sum.