‘Judges must share blame for sub-postmasters scandal’

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://insidetime.org/newsround/judges ... s-scandal/

More than a dozen judges have been accused of failing sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted in the Post Office Horizon scandal, now considered one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

That is the verdict of former Director of Public Prosecution and later High Court Judge Sir David Calvert-Smith, who has reviewed many of the appeals previously submitted by people convicted of charges from the discredited Horizon computer system. He said that in at least 12 of the convictions, judges should have “probed the prosecution case more deeply”.

In 2021, the Post Office instructed him, and Brian Altman KC, to review 42 cases before they went to the Court of Appeal. Eventually the appeal court quashed 39 of those convictions. Addressing a Bar Council conference in London, Sir David said he thought that “surely a judge would have probed a bit more, rather than thinking ‘I’ve got a full case list and want to get on to my next case.’”

Another speaker at the event, barrister Fiona Page, who had represented some of the sub-postmasters, agreed and said one case in which she was involved was “an absolute shocker from start to finish, every aspect of the system let her down. It was a show trial used to justify the Horizon (computer) system and the judge unfortunately fell for it.” Ms Page also called for bodies bringing private prosecutions, as many of the Post Office cases were, to follow a code of conduct similar to that of the CPS.