The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has formally referred the first appeal against conviction of a Post Office Capture user to the Court of Appeal, months after deciding to do so.
The appeal involves the case of Patricia Owen, who died in 2003. She pleaded not guilty to the theft of £6,000, but in 1998 was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, at Canterbury Crown Court.
In July this year, it emerged that the CCRC had decided Owen’s case would be referred for appeal, but it did not do so until yesterday (15 October).
At the same time, the statutory body said that four appeals against convictions of former Capture users will not be referred, because the CCRC’s statutory test for referral had not been met.
“Unlike Mrs Owen’s case, four of these cases were determined by a committee of three commissioners not to raise a real possibility that the conviction would be overturned,” said the CCRC.
On the months it has taken to formally refer Owen’s case, the CCRC said: “There is always a period of time between a decision being made by a committee and the actual referral to the appellate court.”
Owen’s lawyer, Neil Hudgell at Hudgell Solicitors, said the formal referral of her case and new evidence could help other former Capture users to clear their names.
Capture, which predates Fujitsu’s Horizon system, was used in Post Office branches in the 1990s to replace paper-based accounting. Like with the controversial Horizon system at the centre of the Post Office scandal, which saw subpostmasters blamed for unexplained losses, some Capture users were prosecuted for financial crimes.
The controversy over Capture emerged in January last year after ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office told the stories of subpostmasters who had suffered at the hands of the Horizon system.
In the same month, Kevan Jones, an MP at the time who now sits in the House of Lords, highlighted evidence of injustices triggered by Capture losses.
This led to a campaign and, by December 2024, the government promised financial redress and justice for subpostmasters affected by Capture problems. This followed an independent investigation by forensic experts at Kroll, which found there was a “reasonable likelihood” the Post Office Capture software caused accounting losses.
Hudgell said the formal referral of Owen’s appeal “is a really significant moment for those people who were affected by Capture, as this is the first conviction to be formally referred to the Court of Appeal.
“Importantly, it is being done so with evidence which clearly demonstrates people were prosecuted without all the facts to hand, and without evidence which would likely have prevented them from being convicted.”
He added: “The first step now is taking Mrs Owen’s case to the Court of Appeal and seeing her conviction quashed. In light of the new evidence which we now have to hand, we will hopefully be able to open the door to all others who were prosecuted through Capture-based evidence to clear their names, as happened with Horizon.”
Dame Vera Baird KC, chair of the CCRC, said: “We have more than 30 applications to refer Post Office convictions which predate Horizon and most of these cases are under active investigation. In some of these very old cases, there is a dearth of paperwork, dates or other information.
“We have exercised our powers under section 17 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 to require the Post Office to produce all the material they have in each case, and they will provide it where it is available.”
Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software.
Read: Everything you need to know about the Post Office scandal.
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