The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail
By Nick Wallis
This “factual thriller” from the journalist Nick Wallis details a scandal which has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in legal history. On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. They had been prosecuted by the Post Office using IT evidence from an unreliable computer system called Horizon.
When the Post Office became aware that Horizon didn’t work properly, it covered it up. Nick describes how a group of Subpostmasters worked out what was going on, formed a campaign group and fought the government-owned Post Office through the courts to eventual victory.
My comments
I read about the scandal of the British Post Office computer system in The Guardian. The book on it details how the organisation was prepared to avoid investigating complaints about the system and instead assume it was foolproof, and blame the users of it for problems. This included forcing local post office owners to pay for supposed financial shortfalls, often taking them to court and having some falsely jailed. It is also a terrible reflection of the justice system in that courts were prepared to accept that a computer system couldn’t have bugs.
The system did not give the local users a decent ability to delve into transactions to enable an easy reconciliation of a days work. Instances are mentioned where, on advice from help desk staff a reversal entry doubled the error, yet they took no further and didn’t find out why this could happen..
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