I am but a simple person. Someone please explain why we need a law to exonerate innocent people?
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says the government will bring in a new law to “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims” of the Post Office scandal Under the plans, victims will be able to sign a form to say they are innocent in order to have their convictions overturned and claim compensation
Probably because it’s been a known problem and the bureaucracy wasn’t getting it done otherwise.
And Sunak needs the good press of an easy decision.
But I’m American and watching from a distance.
Because the British legal system is starved of money and slowly dying.
It would take years to appeal each conviction, there’s a huge back log of cases, and not enough courts and legal professionals to process them quickly.
Moreover, in order to save money the standard compensation plan is completely fucked. While you can be exonerated if there’s not enough evidence for the state to prove that you’re guilty, in order to get compensation you’d have to prove that you’re innocent.
This is basically impossible for most cases. While we know that all these people were imprisoned because of errors in a computer system, this doesn’t mean that they weren’t also embezzling, and just unlucky to be caught due to computer error.
So the Tories have two options. Leave people that the country suddenly cares about to suffer for years and never receive compensation, or create a special treatment, and hide that they’ve destroyed the legal system.
Unsurprisingly, they’ve gone for the second option.
