Post Office Horizon victims deserve quick justice in Scotland

Anyway, Mr Staunton’s allegations are a sideshow; albeit an entertaining one. The hard fact which Ms Badenoch cannot contest is that the pace of compensation payments, based on convictions overturned, continues to be scandalously slow.

The cast of Mr Bates (Image: free)

Week by week, there are reports around the UK of postmasters who have died, often in tragic circumstances, without their names having been cleared, far less compensation paid. In spite of that, and all the outrage sparked by Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the pace of redress scarcely moves.

That scandal must also be addressed in Scotland with some sense of urgency rather than at the preferred pace of a legal system which prioritises its own interests and reputation. Pressure for that to happen should intensify in the light of yesterday’s announcement of fast track legislation in England and Wales to overturn convictions.

When she appeared before MSPs on January 16th, the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, scarcely gave the impression of a woman in a hurry to remove the stains of false allegations or open the door to compensation while victims are still alive.

Instead, her emphasis was on “the established route of appeal” via the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Court of Appeal. “Due process must be followed”, she intoned, adding the highly caveated assurance: “Scottish prosecutors have taken appropriate steps to expedite these appeals where possible”. Note the last two words.

Ms Bain seemed to place little weight on the fact most of these people have been waiting well over a decade for “due process” to treat them with the slightest respect. I thought then that MSPs should have insisted on a monthly update, rather than a single regal appearance with a narrative that contained more gaps than a redacted FoI response.

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If Ms Bain was called to Holyrood this week, what news would she bring? What has been done to speed up “due process”? What consideration has been given to Scottish legislation which would result in convictions being overturned? What investigations have been initiated of Post Office officials who grossly misled the Prosecution Service for which she now has responsibility?

Meantime, a lot more light has been shed on how that system worked (and, Post Office aside, presumably continues to work). Not a great deal of attention was paid to the Scottish phase of the Horizon inquiry under Sir Wyn Williams which coincided with the Covid hearings that were throwing up more alluring headlines.

I stuck with Horizon and it made me angry. The Scottish case study involved a postmaster in North Uist who died two years after confessing to a crime he did not commit in order to avoid going to jail and whose conviction has since been overturned. The lead investigator, having flatly denied earlier knowledge of problems with Horizon, was confronted by the inquiry’s KC with a report he wrote in 2002 – repeat 2002, Ms Bain – which flatly contradicted that claim.

Anyone listening to the two Scottish investigators was unlikely to have been impressed. They had no training in either law or the workings of Horizon. Then we heard from the fiscal in the case who offered the classic line that he accepted their account “in the same way that you accept the evidence from a forensic science laboratory”.

Kemi Badenoch (Image: free)

Around Scotland, where we are supposed to have an independent prosecution service, that kind of relationship led to scores of innocent people having their lives shattered.

If our independent prosecutors had applied critical faculties to Post Office evidence, or joined the dots around Scotland, the whole affair would have come to a much earlier conclusion. Our legal safeguards would have led the way for the UK – but didn’t.

To me, if not the Lord Advocate, this opened up a far wider question. In her statement to Holyrood, she told MSPs that procurators fiscal were “entitled” to accept the Post Office evidence because their investigators had an “obligation … based on absolute candour and trust”.

Ms Bain continued: “It is clear the Post Office failed in its duty of revelation and as a result some individuals were prosecuted when they should not have been?”

So what, since 2013 when the Crown Office finally had to accept that problem, has been done to investigate the investigators who were in such clear breach of that statutory duty of candour? Even less, I would guess, than has been done to speed the process of overturning wrongful convictions.

It was a revelation to me, I confess, that there are over 70 Specialist Reporting Agencies in Scotland with the same investigatory powers as the Post Office or indeed the police. All of whom, we must assume, are accorded the status of “a forensic science laboratory” when they pass cases to fiscals who are “entitled” to accept what they are handed.

Most of the time that may work fine – but in the case of Horizon it self-evidently did not and it shames the Crown Office that they now hide behind “due process’, regardless of how long it takes, to avoid facing up to failures which have caused so much suffering.

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We can be absolutely certain that computers will get it wrong again and innocent people will find themselves on the receiving end of demands that would not stand up to scrutiny. That is one reason why the determination of so many agencies to push people into doing everything on-line, whether they are capable of handling it or not, is deplorable.

Our Scottish legal system should be even-handed in protecting people from both malice and errors. The Horizon scandal involved both. It would be encouraging for the future if there was less dogged reluctance to admit that the system failed leaving big lessons to be learned as well as wrongs in need of urgent remedy.