Ten-year nightmare of the postmaster whose life was ruined - by a Post Office mistake I knew I had never done anything wrong, but when people have seen you have been convicted at Crown Court we all assume that someone must have done something
Updated
Scott Darlington
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Former Post Office boss steps back from church role in wake of miscarriage of justice scandal telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Japanese firm has a reckoning to face
Gareth Corfield Fri 23 Apr 2021 // 14:15 UTC Share
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Post Office employees were wrongly prosecuted by the company as a direct result of it covering up software bugs in its Horizon IT system, the Court of Appeal has said as it quashed 39 convictions this morning.
Those 39 convictions were obtained by the Post Office s in-house lawyers who ignored their own barristers advice that the institution s behaviour was trampling over established prosecutorial codes intended to promote fairness and honesty.
Lord Justice Holroyde said that the one-time state monopoly had, by representing Horizon as reliable, effectively sought to reverse the burden of proof, leading to criminal defendants having to prove their innocence instead of the Post Office showing they were guilty. Its lawyers compounded this by withholding evidence from courts and defence lawyers alike – evidence which clearly showed the Post Office and Fujitsu
The Fujitsu-developed system, used for accounting and stockpiling, was used as evidence to successfully prosecute 736 people between 2000 and 2014, out of which 42 maintained their innocence for over a decade.
It would later emerge that a system bug had produced financial shortfalls in branch accounts, resulting in unaccounted funds.
Many falsely convicted Post Office employees had their personal lives destroyed as a consequence of the convictions, having been sent to prison and denied insurance in many cases. Some have since passed away, unable to hear today’s verdict.
However, following years of legal battles, Lord Justice Holroyde at the Royal Courts of Justice in London said the Post Office knew there were serious issues about the reliability of Horizon and had a clear duty to investigate the system s flaws.