Surrey woman among 39 subpostmasters cleared of stealing money
They've finally had their names cleared after being convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting
39 former Post Office subpostmasters have been cleared of theft, fraud and false accounting convictions.
The Court of Appeal cleared their names after faults with the Post Office’s Horizon accounting system.
Subpostmasters’ lives were “irreparably ruined” as they lost their jobs, homes and marriages after they were prosecuted by the Post Office – which knew the Fujitsu-developed IT system had “faults and bugs from the earliest days of its operation”, the Court of Appeal heard last month.
Among them was Seema Misra who ran a post office in West Byfleet and was pregnant with her second child when she was jailed for 15 months in 2010:
"It was the worst time of my life. I was eight weeks pregnant luckily. If hadn't been pregnant I would have killed myself for sure."
Jo Hamilton was accused of taking thousands of pounds from a village shop she ran in Hampshire, and was fired in 2006.
She was forced to pay back the cash even though she knew she didn't take it:
"Whatever went wrong with it you were liable for it and that was the party line right from day one and you had to make it good.
"There was no questions about it you just had to put it right."
Lawyers representing 42 former subpostmasters said evidence of serious defects in the Horizon system was “concealed from the courts, prosecutors and defence”, in order to protect the Post Office “at all costs”.
Ahead of the ruling they were wished luck by Reverend Richard Coles:
Their convictions were referred to the court by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) last year following a landmark High Court case against the Post Office.
The Post Office conceded that 39 of the 42 former subpostmasters should have their convictions overturned on the basis that “they did not or could not have a fair trial”.
But it opposed 35 of those 39 cases on a second ground of appeal, which is that the prosecutions were “an affront to the public conscience”.
At the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Friday, 39 of the former subpostmasters finally had their names cleared.
Announcing the court’s ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde said the Post Office “knew there were serious issues about the reliability of Horizon” and had a “clear duty to investigate” the system’s defects.
But the Post Office “consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable” and “effectively steamrolled over any subpostmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy”, the judge added.
The Court of Appeal also allowed the appeals on the basis that their prosecutions were an affront to justice.
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.”
However, three of the former subpostmasters – Wendy Cousins, Stanley Fell and Neelam Hussain – had their appeals dismissed by the court.
Lord Justice Holroyde said the Court of Appeal had concluded that, in those three cases, “the reliability of Horizon data was not essential to the prosecution case and that the convictions are safe”.