Post-mortem

Andrew Stevenson’s article on the Horizon post office tragedy is wrong in almost every aspect (Law, 12 February). There were certainly errors in the Horizon system. Any system of that magnitude will have errors, and it is the duty of the vendors to find them.

However, the Inquiry has shown that the communication between the Post Office and Fujitsu was complex, and left many communication gaps; that the Post Office investigators made an assumption of guilt; that they misrepresented and concealed evidence from the defence; and that each victim was falsely represented as the only person with a problem.

It was the State that gave the Post Office the right to initiate prosecutions without going through the police, although its relevance to the Royal Mail was by then little more than selling stamps and taking in parcels. It was the Post Office that put their investigators on bonuses to get money back from the presumed criminals. It was the Post Office that worked from the highest levels to cover up, when the truth started to come out.

Our court system and our legal profession seem unconcerned that our adversarial trial system gave the party with the long purse an overwhelming advantage over the party without.

Mr Stevenson drags in the red herring of a pardon. Does he not know that a pardon means that the crime stays on record but is forgiven, not that there never was a crime in the first place? In his peroration he laments the failings of institutions and computer software in general. I see no mention of the hardship prolonged by the slowness of the legal system to reduce the suffering caused by so many miscarriages of justice. And his solution? Better funding for the legal system.

John Wade Newington, Edinburgh