The judge recounts how the victim heard someone "calling her from the bushes, threatening her, and telling her to come and join him in the bushes."

He says Quinn followed the victim, walking away from his own home - Mr Justice Bright says this is known because of two witnesses who passed the victim and a man following her, twice.

The first time the witnesses saw them both, Quinn was about 30 seconds behind the victim, the judge says.

"The second time, you were much closer. By this point she was aware that someone was following her, and she was beginning to be anxious. She carried on walking," he tells the court.

Mr Justice Bright turns to the day Quinn committed the rape.

He says "our hero was about 30 years old" when she finished work in the early afternoon on a Friday.

She went to her boyfriend's house for a "small social gathering" and "decided to walk back" to her house in "quite a long journey. Longer, I suspect, than she realised when she started walking".

It was after 04:00 in the morning that Paul Quinn first saw her, as he walked in the opposite direction, says the judge.

"You had been out drinking, dancing and taking drugs in Farnworth."

The judge says Quinn was walking by himself, across a bridge over the M62, down Cleggs Lane and Armitage Avenue and "not very far" from his home.

"By this point, you were not very far from home. But you interrupted your journey because you saw this young woman out late at night walking by herself."

Image source, POOL

Mr Justice Bright says the woman at the heart of this case is "truly a hero" and that is how he will refer to her from this point onwards in the sentencing.

Bright says not only did she have to give evidence at the first trial in 2004, which he says "will have been hard enough", but she then had to return and go through the process again.

It was "obvious to everyone here", how "excruciating" the woman found it to come back a second time, Bright says.

But he says that she "gave her evidence in plain sight of you" in an "entirely straightforward and clear manner", and didn't ask for a screen .

Every step "looked agonising" and she "clearly suffered horribly", Bright says, adding that she gave evidence "with quiet dignity" but through a "constant stream of tears".

She is a "remarkable person", he says.

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

As the judge describes the victim as a hero, she is being held tight by her partner.

She can be seen dabbing her eyes as the judge says "she is the hero of this story".

Quinn is absolutely still, staring straight at the judge.

Mr Justice Bright says it has "long troubled" him that the judicial system has "utterly inadequate terms" for the person to whom a crime is done.

"We use word complainant," but that sounds like someone complaining about a "trivial grievance", he says. "Victim" sounds like someone "with no agency", he adds.

He says the terms are demeaning, adding that "cases like this one are as serious as it gets".

People who take such cases to court have "gumption by the truckload", he says.

He calls rape cases a striking example of this.

"Every single one of them should be thanked and admired unstintingly by every single one of us," he says.

Retelling their stories is an "undeniably uncomfortable process" and the only word that fits is "hero", he says.

Image source, POOL

Warning: This post contains distressing details.

Mr Justice Bright begins by listing the counts for which Quinn is being sentenced for.

Count one was attempting to choke, suffocate or strangle, count two was causing grievous bodily harm with intent, count three was vaginal rape, and count four was anal rape.

"For all four of these counts, the maximum sentence for the offence is life imprisonment," he says.

We are hearing that court has resumed, which means Mr Justice Bright is about to sentence Paul Quinn.

You can watch live above to see the sentencing at Manchester Crown Court.

We'll also be providing details of the judge's sentencing remarks right here.

Image source, Getty Images

The handling of the case that saw Malkinson wrongly jailed is being investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

Five former officers from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and one currently serving with the force are under investigation, the IOPC said in April.

Malkinson was wrongly picked out at as the attacker in an identity parade and jailed in 2004. When the victim gave evidence against Malkinson in 2003 she had doubts she had picked out the right man, but police dismissed this as "just trial nerves".

A DNA sample from a vest top, only recovered and identified in 2007, was analysed and ruled out Malkinson. Earlier this year, jurors at Manchester Crown Court heard that this development "ought to have set alarm bells ringing".

Ass Ch Con of GMP Steph Parker said mistakes had been made on the case, with some of the exhibits disposed of and "we know that there were queries around the identification procedure".

"But we really need to understand how those errors occurred, and why those errors occurred, and only at that point would we be able to understand whether there is blame for the police, for anybody else," she said.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme last month, Andrew Malkinson said it was a "great relief" to hear Paul Quinn had been convicted - "the right person, finally".

He describes Quinn as a "vile man" who has caused "untold suffering" both to the victim and to him.

The "best thing" was being exonerated in 2023 but Quinn's conviction in April 2026 "draws a line under it", Malkinson says, making his exoneration "more secure" and getting "the actual perpetrator behind bars".

Asked about flaws in the police investigation, Malkinson says it was "quite wrong" of police to dismiss the victim's doubts about misidentifying the perpetrator as "just trial nerves".

It is "absolutely important" to go through the relevant processes with the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) and a wider judge-led inquiry, he says, adding that it remains unclear how he was misidentified in the first place.

Asked about life now, Malkinson says it is "much better than it was", but adds: "I struggle, I’m struggling with a lot of mental health issues. Anger as well."

Image source, GMP

It was advances in DNA testing that enabled police to identify Paul Quinn as the offender.

In the 2003 rape, saliva was left on the victim's tank top - a sample of which was recovered and identified in 2007 which ruled out Malkinson.

Quinn had provided the police with a DNA sample in 2012, as police collected samples from known sex offenders.

In 2022 a billion-to-one match of his DNA profile was made.

In August of that year news broke that police had matched the vest top DNA sample to another man.

During the trial, the court heard this development had a "profound" effect on Quinn's internet usage.

He told jurors it was a "complete coincidence" he had begun scouring the news for information on the Malkinson case and repeatedly searched Google, asking: "How long is DNA kept in database", and, "Why do I keep sweating all the time…"

He also searched up "wrongful convictions" in the UK.

Image source, PA Media

Paul Quinn was convicted in April by a jury at Manchester Crown Court.

In the wake of the ruling, Malkinson, who was released from prison in 2020, said he was "content that the right result has finally been achieved for the victim, myself and the public".

"But the truth is that if the police had acted as they should have done, Paul Quinn could have been caught a long time ago," he said.

"Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime."

A key question for Andrew Malkinson has been how he ever got confused with Paul Quinn in the first place.

Malkinson was wrongly picked out as the attacker in an identity parade following the attack on 19 July 2003.

It has since emerged that the victim had doubts she had picked out the right man, but police dismissed this as "just trial nerves".

Malkinson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme in May that the pair "don't look anything alike".

"When I saw his picture, I thought how the hell did I get mistaken for him? I mean, he's got a huge jaw I noticed, and quite cold eyes."

James Burley, from legal charity Appeal, has called for juries to be given "strengthened warning about the pitfalls of eyewitness identification evidence".

Image source, Greater Manchester Police

Claire Ellison
Reporting from Manchester Crown Court

The judge has listened to verbal submissions from the prosecution and Quinn’s defence. He also has the written arguments that both sides emailed earlier.

About 10 minutes ago he told the court he would rise. He will return to sentence the defendant at 14:00.

Paul Quinn stood as the judge stood up and was led down to the cells with a guard just behind him.

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

Lisa Wilding KC, for Quinn, accepts he is going to get a “very substantial” sentence.

She says it is difficult to assess harm 23 years on from the offences and the court needs to take into account the man he is today, not the man he was at the time.

The judge indicates that the defence barrister is going to have to work "quite hard" on that line of mitigation. This is judicial signalling that he is not persuaded by the simple argument that there is no evidence that Quinn has not offended in the same way since.

The court has received a pre-sentence report on Quinn - a formal assessment of the risks he poses - and the indication we’re getting in this hearing is that the expert who wrote the report has ongoing concerns about the risks Quinn poses.

Mr Justice Bright says that one of the things that concerns him is that some offenders who commit "random acts of violence are capable of doing that at any stage of their life".

Claire Ellison
Reporting from Manchester Crown Court

Warning: This post contains distressing details.

We're still hearing submissions in court and comments from the judge. While we wait for more details, let's go for a moment to the victim's testimony at Quinn's trial.

The woman who was attacked by Quinn had been walking home in the early hours of a summer morning after a row with her boyfriend.

It was quite a long walk, lasting several miles, and part of it was picked up by CCTV cameras.

It was when she approached a wooded area that she heard a voice and rustling which frightened her. It was a man, who said: "Come into the bushes, I’ve got a gun pointing at your head."

She sent a text message to her boyfriend, who was asleep, and told the man she would call the police. She picked up her pace and carried on walking towards home.

In her testimony, she said:

"I looked over my shoulder. I saw a male, he was wearing a white collared shirt that was fully unbuttoned at the front and flapping open... he was walking on the same side of the road as me and in my direction. Each time I looked over my shoulder he seemed to be closer.

"I was very frightened by this time… As I approached the motorway bridge...I heard five or six running steps and then felt an almighty force behind me like a push, but with the man attached to me. I remember sliding down a grass embankment…"

The victim said she "thought ... the man was trying to kill me".

She told him: "Please don't I’ve got two babies don't hurt me," but said "that comment seemed to annoy him even more".

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

The judge says that the strangulation had left the victim in a deep state of unconsciousness.

"She was unconscious for half an hour, so unconscious that those things that happened must have caused her extreme pain, but it failed to rouse her."

Mr Justice Bright says that it was a “minor miracle” she had not died.

This matters to the judge - because he is underlining that she was left vulnerable.

In other words, he is not regarding the strangulation as an add-on offence, but an appalling crime in its own terms that needs to be recognised in the sentencing.

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

Mr Justice Bright says that the woman suffered an abduction "of a particular kind", but notes that nobody can be sure based on the evidence how long Quinn followed her for before he dragged her down a bank by a motorway.

The defence submissions, which we have not heard in open court, are that Quinn’s level of personal culpability is lower than the highest level.

This means that they are arguing he is not the type of offender who has taken the greatest number of steps to plan their crime (an example would be a rapist who has researched and planned their attack for weeks).

This is a really technical part of the sentencing exercise in which the judge has to work out where exactly Quinn should be placed on the scale of harm caused.

If however the judge opts for a life sentence, it all becomes rather moot. And it’s worth noting at this point that Andrew Malkinson was given a life sentence in 2004 for this crime.

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

Warning: This post contains distressing details.

John Price KC, the prosecutor, is laying out to the court where Quinn sits on the scale of similar offenders.

He says the culpability - meaning the personal blame that Quinn bears - is at "the highest end of the scale".

In summary, he is arguing that the crime is aggravated by the fact that he did not just sexually attack the victim, but strangled her unconscious and inflicted grievous bodily harm on her face - and had first stalked her through the town of Little Hulton. She had known a man was closing in.

"It is the case that the evidence would support the conclusion that the intention to do what was done was formed a while earlier in her journey," says the prosecutor.

"This is a lady who was swept from a public place ... to a place where she was at his mercy and beyond help."

Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent, at Manchester Crown Court

Barrister Abigail Husbands reads the impact statement from the victim - this is a formal reminder to the court of how she has been affected.

"After 20 years, I now have justice but that does not change the fact that 2 lives have been impacted in such a way," she says.

"I am aware that someone has had 17 years robbed as a result of this case and that stays with me.

"As for me, the impact of what happened that day has stayed with me and will remain with me for life.

"Every day I look at my face and see the disfigurement, the scarring. It is a permanent reminder of that night and what I experienced. I have to live with that."

The victim's statement adds: "I live in constant fear that someone is behind me, even in places that others wouldn’t consider a risk, like the supermarket."

For Quinn, "it was one night of his life. For me it was one night that changed my life," she says.