The role of lawyers in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history will start to come under the spotlight this week, as the Post Office IT inquiry moves into a new stage.
The statutory inquiry has previously focused on the actions of the Post Office in the wrongful prosecutions of around 700 sub-postmasters accused of fraud and theft based on the now-discredited Horizon accounting software.
But the 20-year scandal has also involved lawyers throughout, be it from the contracts drawn up between the Post Office and postmasters through to the appeal proceedings which cleared those falsely accused. The ethics of in-house lawyers and the extent to which they challenge their paymasters may also be examined in greater detail.
Professor Richard Moorhead, of Exeter Law School, who has written and researched extensively on the Post Office scandal, emphasised the importance of this phase of the inquiry for the lawyers involved and wider profession.
‘One of the our most serious miscarriages of justice cases may well be about to lead to the most serious professional misconduct scandal of our lifetimes,’ he said in a vlog ahead of the inquiry reopening tomorrow. 'The scandal involves many lawyers, sometimes in ways that might be merely embarrassing, sometimes in ways that implicate ethics in the broader sense or sometimes in ways that may mean professional misconduct and sometimes perhaps for one or two there may be questions about breaches of criminal law.’
The first witness giving evidence tomorrow will be Post Office Limited group general counsel Ben Foat, who will be questioned in particular on responses from the organisation to requests for evidence.
Prosecution expert witnesses, the former head of the Royal Mail Group's criminal law team and other lawyers are expected to appear later this month. The later stages of the legal proceedings will be examined in detail later this year.
Phase four is addressing action taken against sub-postmasters and others, policy making, audits and investigations, civil and criminal proceedings, knowledge of and responsibility for failures in investigation and disclosure.
In his opening statement last year, Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, said chair Sir Wyn Williams will 'consider the civil actions taken against subpostmasters to recover these losses and will consider the Post Office’s decisions to prosecute individuals for theft and false accounting, on the basis of the data shown on Horizon'.
The inquiry has already had written evidence from Lee Castleton, who ran a branch in Bridlington before he was put through a week-long civil trial without representation and made bankrupt by a Post Office claim for repayment of missing monies.
Castleton stated that the lawyer acting for the Post Office had threatened to ‘ruin’ him and urged to ‘think of your family’.
Following the trial, at which Castleton was unrepresented because he could no longer afford a lawyer, he was called a ‘thief’ by the Post Office and was ultimately ordered to repay the £25,000 missing from his office accounts plus the Post Office’s £321,000 costs.
