Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice sparks outrage at last

“WE’VE JUST got to trust in the British justice system and everything will be all right.” So says a wretched Lee Castleton (whose character is played by Will Mellor) in “Mr Bates v The Post Office”, a new ITV drama about hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted in an accounting scandal between 1999 and 2015. British justice did not make everything all right for Mr Castleton. Far from it.

In 2004, when “Horizon”, a new accounting system operated by Fujitsu, a Japanese technology firm, showed a loss of £25,859 ($47,397) at Mr Castleton’s branch in Bridlington, Yorkshire, the Post Office told him to make up the shortfall. He refused; it later became clear that faulty software had generated errors which he was unable to correct. Mr Castleton took his case to court. A judge ordered him to pay costs of £321,000, which bankrupted him.