A momentous 12 months

Whilst the Common Issues trial judgment on 15 March 2019 was, for me, the game changer (being the first time in 20 years anything had gone against the Post Office throughout the Horizon scandal), the judgment handed down by Mr Justice Fraser on 16 Dec 2019 was, if anything, more significant.

To mark the occasion I have put together a series of links in the form of a tweet thread which rattle through the ongoing ramifications of that judgment. If I was a bit more organised I would have sat down and written a proper, 5000 word essay, but I didn’t. Sorry.

But don’t worry, if you want to spend several days reading back over the last 12 months the links in the tweet thread will take you off in all sorts of different directions.

Off the top of my head, in the last year we have had:

– 47 Subpostmaster convictions referred by the CCRC back to the courts

– 6 Convictions quashed

– 900 prosecutions revealed

– Two compensation schemes launched

– One inquiry opened

– A Parliamentary Ombudsman complaint submitted

– A BEIS select committee investigation left open-ended

– A criminal investigation into two former Fujitsu engineers launched

– and Paula Vennells mislaying three jobs

Read the thread for more.

(If you started singing “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” to yourself whilst reading any part of that list, you are not alone)

Change the law

Another wholly beneficial side-effect of the Horizon issues trial is that it could well lead to a change in the law on how IT data is brought before the courts.

Stephen Mason and Paul Marshall are two of nine authors behind an immensely readable academic paper urging a far better approach to the disclosure and understanding of electronic/digital evidence.

It’s only nine pages long, but the paper clearly has a lot of work behind it.

If you are a lawyer, forensic accountant or IT/legal nerd, you can either read the introduction here and then click around randomly as I did trying to find the not very obvious link to the document itself – or just dive straight in.

Team first limb v team first and second limb

I will be in court tomorrow wading through legal argument on a niche, but important matter as we progress towards the possible quashing of 41 Subpostmaster convictions.

Bizarrely, it seems a lot of the appellants’ law firms are lining up on the side of the Post Office in trying to dissuade the Court from examining the second limb of the Criminal Cases Review Commission’s Statement of Reasons.

The reasons are explained in Court of Appeal: Battle Royale, but it is going to make tomorrow interesting, watching the Low Hanging Fruit gang line up with the Post Office against the Noble Cause cheerleaders.

If you want to follow everything which happens in court blow-by-blow, I’ll be live-tweeting proceedings from 10.30am tomorrow (Thursday). If you’re new to twitter all you have to do is click on this link and refresh the page every five minutes or so.

If you’d rather wait to read the court report, I’ll try to get it out on www.postofficetrial.com before 8pm. This mainly because that is the point at which Manchester United start playing Sheffield Utd and I will, inevitably, become distracted.

Thanks again for all the wonderful correspondence. Do please get in touch if you ever spot anything you think I would find interesting, or that you find interesting – or you just want to say hello! No harm in that.

Cheers

Nick