There seems to be much more to this than has seen the light of day!!
Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a flaw in the computer system Horizon.
So they bring in a new accounting system and suddenly they uncover a mass of serious fraud!!
People were sent to prison, lost their careers, lost their families and friends, and had their lives turned upside down.
Did nobody suspect that there might be a fault with the system?
Why was nobody held to account for this gross missjustice??
It’s actually worse than that, Opher. There’s a very good Wiki article on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal. That’s what you get when you allow unbridled power to a corrupt, politicized entity like the Post Office. It’s a classic example of government failure to police itself.
Policing oneself is always a recipe for disaster. hat’s what the Tories are doing!!
Oh, but there’s more. The Post Office bigwigs set out to corrupt the entire “justice” system – and succeeded! I know this, because the judge in the Seema Misra case (2010) was also the judge in a 2006 case on which I was on the jury. He was absolutely brilliant in the case I was involved in – it was police overreach, and he knew it. And he contrived – without having to use the “nuclear option” of instructing us to acquit – to secure the acquittal. Partly, I suspect, by “smuggling” members of a jury who had just finished a far more complex and higher-profile trial – including me! – into his court.
It’s a pity I wasn’t on the Seema Misra jury. She would never have been convicted if there had been someone with both ethical and software skills on that jury.
My experience of jury service was to convict someone who was probably innocent.
I think those at the top of the Post Office want to be stood in court.
Their witnesses and lawyers should certainly be up for perjury, at least. But I don’t think the penalties for perjury are harsh enough for what they’ve done. The big bosses should be up for perverting the course of justice, which can carry life imprisonment on conviction.
Thoroughly agree! Accountability should be the basis of everything – which is why all those politicians should be in court! They’ve all broken the law!