Analysis: The Post Office scandal is not over yet

decorative In a piece for The Conversation, Dr Karen Nokes (UCL Laws) and Professor Richard Moorhead of the University of Exeter describe the origins of the Post Office scandal, possibly the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history, and explain why it is ongoing. The Post Office scandal involves miscarriages of justice involving hundreds of innocent people who were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting. It has been going on for over 20 years, with the Post Office accused of a cover up after it repeatedly failed to disclose key evidence. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and court cases have heard that  at least 60 subpostmasters have died  without seeing justice or compensation, and at least four took their own lives. We are now conducting a three-year study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, to examine the role of lawyers in the scandal, explore the subpostmasters' experience of the criminal justice system, and to determine what implications the scandal has for lawyers' ethics and the legal sector more widely. So how did the scandal start, and why is it taking so long for the victims to get justice? Horizon - In 2000, the Post Office introduced the Horizon IT system across its network of franchises and branches. Horizon flagged accounting shortfalls, indicating that money was missing.