I’M like a dog with a bone with this story – I know. But it wants forensic attention. On Tuesday last week, the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC spent an uncomfortable hour in Holyrood, answering questions from MSPs about the Post Office Horizon scandal.
This is the first time the Lord Advocate has spoken publicly about the distinctive Scottish impact of the faulty Fujitsu computing system which implicated hundreds of innocent postmasters in crimes of dishonesty over more than a decade.
She finds herself answering these questions because in Scotland, it was the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service which ran these cases.
South of the Border, the Post Office pursued its own private prosecutions, lodging indictments, cutting plea deals with the postmasters they were accusing of crimes, and offering them softer sentences if they pled guilty and paid over the “missing” money into Post Office coffers.
Some of these deals were premised on postmasters agreeing for their defence lawyers not to mention Horizon faults during any pleas in mitigation on their behalf. In the paranoid world of Post Office law enforcement, postmasters had to accept being totally in the wrong even to plead guilty.
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In Scotland, the criminal side of this scandal worked differently. Here, the Post Office was just a “specialist reporting agency” – passing on incriminating evidence to procurators to make the final call on whether or not postmasters found themselves up before the sheriff accused of theft, embezzlement or fraud.
They could – and did – make civil threats against subpostmasters they reckoned owed them money, but they didn’t have the power to dangle criminal theft charges in front of desperate men and women in the hopes they pled guilty to false accounting and settle their phantom debts.
Last week’s statement represented Bain’s first opportunity to set out in detail what Scotland’s prosecutors knew about problems with Horizon, when they knew about them, and what they decided to do about it.
Some of us optimistically hoped that the independent check of external prosecutors might mean fewer people were wrongfully accused of theft and embezzlement here.........