Almost 40 former sub-postmasters who were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting because of the Post Office’s defective IT system, Horizon, have had their convictions quashed today after the Court of Appeal ruled that the cases were an “affront to the public conscience.”
Criminal Proceedings | Rosenblatt’s Financial Crime Team
In a previous article, we considered the thousands of postmasters between 1999 and 2015 who were sacked or prosecuted after money appeared to go missing from their Post Office branches. The Court of Appeal began hearing the cases of 42 former sub-postmasters on 22 March 2021 and announced its ruling earlier today, overturning the convictions in 39 instances.
Announcing the Court’s ruling was Lord Justice Holroyde who said that the Post Office “knew there were serious issues about the reliability of Horizon” and had a “clear duty to investigate” the system’s defects. Instead the Post Office “consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable”, and “effectively steamrolled over any sub-postmasters who sought to challenge its accuracy.
Lord Justice Holroyde, sitting with Mr Justice Picken and Mrs Justice Farbey, said, “Post Office Limited’s failures of investigation and disclosure were so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the ‘Horizon cases’ an affront to the conscience of the court.”
Three former sub-postmasters however, namely Wendy Cousins, Stanley Fell and Neelam Hussain had their appeals dismissed by the Court of Appeal this morning. In those cases, the Court held that the reliability of the Horizon data was not essential to the prosecutor’s case, therefore the convictions remain safe and can be upheld.
This decision is welcomed by many and comes after these sub-postmasters have spent years trying to clear their names. Following the erroneous convictions some postmasters were imprisoned, with others shunned by their communities and left struggling to find work.
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