She has to live with that every day of her life and is now doing what she can to save others that trauma, despite knowing that there will be dickheads who just want to pile on anyway. Have some humanity.
"Samuel didn't need to die and that's the guilt I carry every day with me," she said.
He did commit perjury but he, and Anne Chambers (who provided witness testimony once, and then said she wouldn't do it again because what they were asking her to do wasn't right) were both bounced into it. Neither of them were instructed as expert witnesses but the courts treated them as such. Neither of them were told of their responsibilities to the court. Both of them had their witness statements tampered with by more senior people who absolutely did know better.
Jenkins, in particular, does have to answer for his actions. But his bosses and the Post Office prosectors have much, much more to answer for and they can't be allowed to get away with pretending this was just mid-level IT bods lying of their own accord.
Jail does not help. These are not the cases I would choose to test anti-carceral arguments on - and in the current carceral context, jail would be eminently reasonable. As long as they don't come out to their massive pensions and massive houses and all the trappings of luxury they bought off the backs of the people who were powerless to stop them.
I covered that. Regardless, a spell in jail won't deprive them of their pensions or their homes (Jeffrey Epstein went to jail and came out just as rich and powerful as when he went in).
I want them to pay a real price. The same price they extracted from thousands of subpostmasters. And I want every other senior executive and politician to know that it is a price that can be extracted from them too.
This absolutely was a fraud. The (unfair) contract required postmasters to make good any shortfalls. The hundreds who were prosecuted either refused or ran out of their own money to make up the shortfalls. Many were sacked because they refused to sign the accounts, losing their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names as a result. Thousands more were just quietly putting their own money in, sometimes unfairly suspecting an employee of theft, due to errors the Post Office knew about but refused to admit.
And a primary driver of the scandal was the imperative to make the Post Office profitable so that it could be privatised, with investigators paid partly based on how much money they recovered. New Labour and the Coalition both have much of this blood on their hands.
Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names. I'm not a fan of carceral solutions and Noel Thomas, imprisoned for nine months before his conviction was overturned, says he would not wish it on anyone. He is right. But destitution is something these people visited on hundreds of people for their own financial gain and those gains need to come back to the people they harmed.
This is a useful Computer Weekly summary which links to all its pieces over the years: Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know
Yes it is. Why does every thread in this community have some dickwad pretending not to know what the community is for?
Juan Guaidó, at the time Venezuela’s highest-ranking democratically elected official, as its rightful leader.
Wut?
It's framed perfectly. Did you just not bother to read all of it or something?