How does someone begin to process the news that they are free after decades of wrongful imprisonment?

Through the extraordinary skill of a court artist, we got a sense of that this week when 68-year-old Peter Sullivan from Merseyside learned he had finally been exonerated after 38 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.

Captured at the moment an appeal court judge tells him he has been acquitted, we see his hand clapped over his half-open mouth, his brow deeply furrowed beneath closely cropped white hair, and his eyes, astonished eyes, anguished eyes, brimming with tears.

Thirty eight years branded as the murderer of a defenceless young woman. Thirty eight years disbelieved. Thirty eight years lost. We can only guess at the grief for decades stolen. Two lives stolen – 21-year-old Diane Sindall’s murder is now listed as unsolved. Two victims and no one held to account.

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The quaint term “miscarriage of justice” hardly conveys the catastrophic impact of a wrongful conviction, especially one for such a serious crime. Sullivan has experienced the longest such injustice of any living inmate in the UK.

As he wrestles with the enormity of his ordeal, Miss Sindall’s family are facing the devastating truth that her killer escaped.

Sullivan was prosecuted many years before techniques had been developed to extract DNA from semen samples, but it was the testing last year of a sample found on Miss Sindall that allowed him to be ruled out as the killer. Mr Sullivan says he is not angry or bitter, and that he now longs for the........

© Herald Scotland