The Horizon IT Post Office conspiracy

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Somewhere between 500 and 2000 post office branch managers were deprived of their good name, forced into either prosecution or paying money claimed by the Post Office as fraudulently stolen, followed by the loss of their skilled professional livelihood. The government is currently talking in public about legislating to absolve all of them by act of Parliament since it is blatantly obvious, and has been for longer than a decade, that the IT system on which the accusations were based was so flawed that the data on which the prosecutions were based was in fact impossible to rely on.

In 2019, the High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty and in 2020 the government established a public inquiry. In April 2021 the Court of Appeal quashed 39 convictions. As of January 2024, some victims are still fighting to have their convictions overturned and receive compensation, the public inquiry is ongoing, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating for potential fraud offences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_P ... ce_scandal

Clearly the "Act of Parliament" mass abandonment of all the convictions is an interference in the independence of the judiciary and cannot possibly be allowed to proceed, it would lead to a constitutional crisis. Each of the convictions has to be reversed by an appeal court, which means that grounds have to apply to each convict individually.

I can think of only one way in which this could be achieved. Every Post Office employee and expert witness who gave evidence in any of those trials must be investigated for perjury, the individual statements in evidence which they gave in court examined, and they must be individually prosecuted for giving false evidence under oath. Only then will there be evidence for each case before the appeal court to overturn the original convictions and clear the names of the branch managers involved.

Secondary evidence is also relevant, to establish which of the Post Office investigators lied to any branch manager during their initial investigation which led to a prosecution, financial loss and dismissal, and they in turn should be brought before a court for their conduct. Had they raised alarm bells within the Post Office in a timely manner the whole mess would have been averted. The scandal is primarily of their making and they have emerged, so far, unscathed by their professional inadequacies.

I can't see how any appeals process can analyse the branch managers as a group, when the trials and convictions were of individuals. Perhaps as a group the convictions can simply be dismissed as unsafe, but the branch managers deserve nothing less than individual exoneration and a recognition that there remains no stain on their character, though I presume many of them would prefer never to hear the words "Post Office" again. An immense compensation in recognition of their appalling treatment by failed corporate direction might go some way toward closure.

[Bryn Mawr]

The only problem with this approach is time.

Many of the branch managers are old and the original prosecutions took years. Any appeals process of the form you suggest would also take years and many would not live to see their names exonerated.

They need to be cleared, and compensated, this year - not this decade.

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That would put these convictions into the same category as the pardons issued to "anyone convicted or cautioned for consensual homosexual activity, under now-abolished laws" who "can apply to have them disregarded. The convictions would be wiped from record and an automatic pardon given." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59863140

The convictions would disappear but I had thought the process should be more focused on crucifying each and every participant in the lying which gave rise to the injustice - the cause rather than the effect. The effect on sub-postmasters never much bothered me, I do not particularly like sub-postmasters. They actively participated in the government's destruction of what had been a masterful component of the public services, set up to do a specific job which had been done well for centuries. Then sub-postmasters arrived, a bunch of license-holders bidding simply for a contract to make a profit alongside flogging sweets and stationery, and the Post Office collapsed for lack of foundations. I'm sat half a mile from the old town Post Office which had done the job since early Victorian times and now stands roofless with bats and pigeons defacing the disintegrating counters.

One the other side of the coin there's this quote from a Computer Weekly article of 2014:

The scope of the investigation is another major bone of contention, said Arbuthnot. He said the Post Office had changed its stance on the definition of “the system”, from meaning the software and the other processes around it – including systems that interface with it and training – to just the Horizon system itself. Another report from Second Sight is expected in April 2015, which sources believe will reveal more issues with Horizon and its supporting processes.

In a letter to Arbuthnot, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells defended the Post Office investigation. “In summary, it is my view that the scheme and its processes are, in fact, operating as they were designed to. The scheme has been enormously helpful: We have found out much more about the underlying complaints of individual applicants and, through the scheme mechanism, we are seeking where it is possible and realistic to do so, to resolve each of those individual complaints. That has always been our shared ambition for the scheme and, on any reasonable and fair-minded view, I do not see any proper reason to revisit and alter the processes we designed together at this juncture or, indeed, at all.

"I am very proud of the responsible manner which the business has acted on this matter and I can assure you that Post Office will continue thoroughly to re-investigate every case that has been raised by individual applicants and we remain committed to trying to resolve, in a manner which is fair to all parties, the issues they have raised in the context of the scheme.”
Post Office 'awash with criminals'

One source said the Post Office is refusing to investigate cases that have come to light since the original deadline for subpostmasters to make a claim.

Mike Wood, member of Parliament for Batley and Spen, summed up the feelings of many that there are too many cases in doubt for the Post Office to hold its current stance.

“Either the Post Office is awash with criminals who open sub post offices for personal gain or something has gone terribly wrong. MPs are inclined to believe the latter and we are all shocked the Post Office seems to not want to get to the bottom of all this.”

And that was on Paula Vennells's watch as CEO, who handed back her CBE yesterday, though not her £400,000 golden parachute from fleeing the post in 2019. She cannot possibly have been unaware when she said this and ever thereafter, that the Post Office was in fact whitewashing and shredding documents and refusing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That, in my view, makes her one of those culpable, regardless of how far back - 2000 or so - the blame-game and whitewashing and bullying started.

[Bryn Mawr]

I would totally agree that those in the Post Office who continued with the prosecutions despite having been told by the forensic IT specialists they employed to check Horizon that the system was faulty and that its figures were unreliable should be prosecuted themselves and punished to the full extent of the law.

This, however, should not be done in such a way as to delay the exoneration and compensation of the victims - and not the paltry £40,000 average they appear to have paid out so far.

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It could be that the government's overriding of the court verdicts and reversing this entire category of convictions is the best way forward. It is axiomatic that the unjust verdicts and sentences delivered in each case were the fault of the court process itself, since the courts are surely designed to avoid all illegitimate convictions. If the records indicate that judges leaned in favour of the prosecutors in these court cases, perhaps those judges should be simply condemned as inadequate to their task.

[magentaflame]

I've only recently come across this. It could very easily happen here too. The Corporatization of our entire country is rather scary.
I feel sick for these post masters. I watched the parliamentary investigation thingy......those managers and CEO answers made me so angry! I hope there is gaol outcomes for these individuals. That would wipe their smug dispositions from them .

When are we going to learn and actually do something about it?