Looks like they’re all getting dragnetted into the scandal one by one.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sir Keir Starmer says he wasn’t aware of the three Horizon cases brought against sub-postmasters by the Crown Prosecution Service when he led it.
Between 1999 and 2015, the vast majority of prosecutions of hundreds of sub-postmasters, when faults with the Horizon system wrongly made it appear that money had gone missing, were conducted by the Post Office itself, rather than the CPS.
Under plans set out by the government on Wednesday, legislation will be introduced to overturn these convictions, with affected sub-postmasters being asked to sign a declaration that they committed no offence, so they can then claim compensation.
In the past 10 days, Sir Ed Davey has come under repeated fire from a number of Tory MPs over his time as postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012, in the coalition government.
In May 2010, he refused to meet former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, who led the campaign to expose the Post Office scandal, saying he did not believe it “would serve any useful purpose”.
However, the Lib Dem leader has said he “deeply regrets not realising that the Post Office was lying to him”, and not asking executives “tougher questions”.
The original article contains 527 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It does not matter whether he personally knew. The prosecutions were “so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the “Horizon cases” an affront to the conscience of the court”.
The CPS are responsible for the vast majority of prosecutions in this country and they brought at least three “egregious” Horizon cases. It raises into question how they proceed against other defendants, most of whom are not sympathetic, middle-class pillars of the community and have even less chance of fighting it that the subpostmasters did.
Starmer headed up the CPS and he was responsible for prosecutorial conduct at the time. He cannot claim ignorance as a defence. He should be committing to finding out what the hell went wrong and making sure it can never happen again, to anybody.
