A law to exonerate deputy post chiefs whose lives were torn apart has been presented by the government

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Legislation to overturn wrongful convictions of subpostmasters involved in the Horizon IT scandal was introduced by the government on Wednesday.

The proposed post office The Offenses (Horizon System) Bill “marks an important step forward towards finally clarifying” the names of hundreds of aggrieved branch managers whose lives have been “cruelly torn apart”, the Prime Minister has said Minister Rishi Sunak.

Legislation will exonerate people convicted in England and Wales based on faulty Horizon accounting software in what has been called the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history .

The new law Downing Street said that under the law, convictions will be automatically quashed if they meet the following criteria:

– have been prosecuted by the Post Office or the Crown Prosecution Service;

– Were for offenses committed in relation to the activities of the Post Office between 1996 and 2018;

– Were for relevant offenses such as theft, fraud and false accounting;

– Were against sub-postmasters, their employees, officers, family members or direct employees of the Post Office working in a post office position that used Horizon system software.

Those whose convictions have been overturned will receive an interim payment with the option of taking a fixed, final amount immediately. offer of £600,000, according to number 10.

Mr. Sunak said: “I want to pay tribute to all the postmasters who have shown such courage and perseverance in their fierce campaign for justice, and to those who tragically will not receive the justice they deserve .

“While I know nothing can make up for what they went through, today's legislation marks an important step toward clearing their names forever.

< p>“We owe it to the victims of this scandal, whose lives and livelihoods were brutally destroyed, to deliver the justice they fought so long and hard for, and to ensure that nothing like this happens again. reproduce. »< /p>

More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and criminally convicted between 1999 and...