On the Horizon
A new video to overview the forthcoming Horizon Inquiry's engagement with lawyering.
The Horizon IT Inquiry restarts next week.
Phase 4 covers "Action against Sub-postmasters and others: policy making, audits and investigations, civil and criminal proceedings, knowledge of and responsibility for failures in investigation and disclosure."
Phase 5, "Redress: access to justice, Second Sight, Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme, conduct of the group litigation, responding to the scandal and compensation schemes."
And, Phase 6 - Governance: monitoring of Horizon, contractual arrangements, internal and external audit, technical competence, stakeholder engagement, oversight and whistleblowing.
You may appreciate from the bolding above that lawyers are going to feature heavily, and in Phases 4 and 5, very heavily.
I've had the privilege of giving quite a few talks on the Scandal, particularly to interested in-house lawyers, private practice curiously a little less interested, and out of those, I have developed a 20-minute video outlining how the lawyers are involved and are likely to face questions about their involvement in one of our worst miscarriages of justice. You can watch it here.
great video. But the postmaster at the end missed one point - the PO positively knew Horizon had problems (at least features it couldn't understand).
My article (mostly about prosecutorial misconduct, now at
https://jeremydaw.github.io/pages/legal/pcj-writeup.html) finishes by saying
Postscript: Fujitsu
The following post has just appeared https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/treasury-announces-compensation-for-555-civil-litigants.
Briefly, the Government intends to go after Fujitsu to "tackle compensation". Just to make it clear, none of the misconduct recounted above, or its consequences, can be blamed on Fujitsu. Nor can the fact that the Post Office continued to pursue subpostmasters when it was clear something was wrong, as when
multiple subpostmasters reported the same problem
when its own trainers or managers reported problems they couldn't understand
discrepancies doubling when subpostmasters followed helpline instructions