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Towards the heart of it


Published on 30 April 2024


This week and next, evidence before the Inquiry takes us right into the critical work of Cartwright King sift and its ‘assurance’ by Brian Altman KC.

There is one question that was at the heart of the Court of Appeal case in Hamilton and that has yet to be answered. It is a question that is at the heart of the Post Office Inquiry. It is the question posed by this quote when Brian Altman, before the Court of Appeal, discusses why it was that Seema Misra did not receive the disclosure she ought to have done in her trial:

The why, the why it didn’t happen, we have put, you may recall, in our short response skeleton of 8 January.  We don’t know.  Was it incompetence?  Was it individuals not understanding their duties?  Or was it deliberate?  There is no evidence before the court to say which it was, but the plain fact of the evidence is it was not disclosed ….

It is important because, just before Seema’s trial in 2010, a key bug came to light which the lawyers and Post Office expert knew about. It was a trial seen in the Post Office as a must-win, and the bug, which related to an updated online version of Horizon rather than the legacy version Seema had worked under, was not disclosed. Mrs Misra lost and was sent to prison, ten weeks pregnant.

A PO lawyer, Jarnail Singh, crowed about the victory afterwards, thinking they had stopped the bandwagon of Horizon complaints.

It is an important question because it begs another question: why was the evidence that Seema Misra’s conviction was unsafe not disclosed once Cartwright King started its sift of cases for disclosure problems in 2013?

We have the outlines of an answer in Susan Crichton’s evidence last week:

  1. Because Cartwright King had a conflict of interest that several spotted but were reassured on or failed to address (such conflicts cannot, in fact, be addressed – it should have been fatal to Cartwright King’s reviewing their own work: they were marking their own homework when there were doubts about that work).
  2. Cartwright King limited their review to exclude Horizon legacy cases (when bugs in new Horizon might suggest old Horizon also had bugs).
  3. The Post Office adopted a passive, resistant approach to the involvement of people like Seema Misra in the mediation. Indeed, Seema Misra, in particular, appeared to feature heavily in their discussions. She was a bull, to which Susan Crichton did not wish to show a red rag and to whom Brian Altman did not want Post Office to apologise lest that prompted an appeal.
  4. They considered only two documents for disclosure: the Second Sight report (and only the final version not the drafts) and the Rose Report.
  5. No one, save perhaps Jonathan Swift in his review in 2015/6 (and for that reason rather surprisingly not giving evidence in person to the Inquiry as yet), appears to have asked Gareth Jenkins in detail about the problems with his evidence.

The latter point is extraordinary. A line of inquiry that one might think any fair prosecutor or their advisers would follow on discovering a problem with the safety of their convictions was not followed. It was one of the reasons why Mr Altman stood up in the Court of Appeals and made the remarks he did.

Why did Mr Jenkins not disclose the evidence he was supposed to? Might there be a good reason? What else might he know which should be revealed?

We have the beginnings of the answer: because Post Office lawyers knew he had been asked not to by them. If that is the explanation, in covering their own backs, they orchestrated an extraordinary injustice.

This week and next, we will see if it runs deeper than that.

The story at the heart of the Post Office Scandal from 2013 onwards hangs to a significant degree on the legal work under the microscope this week and next. It will explain how the Post Office went from being told in 2013 that their prosecutions were profoundly impacted by false evidence from their expert to saying to a Select Committee and Minister in 2015 that their work had not uncovered anything to suggest miscarriages of justice.

The Court of Appeal missed a significant part of the story; some clues were there: How come Simon Clarke raised this in 2013, and we are here in 2021 only just discovering the beginnings of what went wrong? They could have asked pointedly and directly, but they did not.

If asked to explain what had happened Mr Altman would have had to flip from being advocate to witness. He will his chance soon.

This week, that failure begins its correction. Hugh Flemington, former Head of Legal at Post Office Ltd; Harry Bowyer, Barrister and former employee of Cartwright King Solicitors; Martin Smith, Solicitor and former employee of Cartwright King Solicitors; and Jarnail Singh, Solicitor and former lawyer at Royal Mail Group and Post Office Ltd, are giving evidence with Simon Clarke (Cartwright King) and Brian Altman KC the following week.