The conviction was quashed in 1996 in the light of new forensic and other evidence. During the appeal hearing, a Home Office pathologist, Dr Ian West, admitted that some of the evidence that he had used at Wallace's trial had been supplied to him by "an American security source". The journalist Paul Foot, in his book "Who Framed Colin Wallace?", suggested that Wallace may have been framed for the killing, possibly by renegade members of the security services in a bid to discredit his allegations about the Kincora scandal, and the fact that members of the intelligence community had attempted to rig the 1974 general election after which Harold Wilson came to power with a minority government.