The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred a conviction based on the use of Post Office 3's IT system to the Court of Appeal.
An appeal from former postmaster Gareth Snow, who ran the Denbighshire branch, has the potential to expand opportunities Scandal at the post office even further. Snow used the Post Office's Automatic Payment Service (APS) and Automatic Payment Terminal (APT) when his branch began to experience a shortfall that eventually reached almost £60,000.
After an audit of his branch in November 2000, Postal Service prosecutors said he falsified documents for accounting purposes that were supposed to cover losses. In July 2001, at Caernarfon Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to all counts of false reporting and was sentenced to six months in prison. Snow admitted that he falsified reporting, but said that was because errors caused by the APT led to reporting shortages.
He initially applied for leave to appeal the conviction in 2021, but later abandoned the move. A subsequent application to the CCRC was submitted in March 2023.
The latest appeal means convictions based on three different Post Office IT systems have been sent to the Court of Appeal. Nearly 900 convictions based on the Post Office's infamous Horizon system. were abolished by law, Bye currently one sentence is based on the Pre-Horizon Capture system was referred to the Court of Appeal. About 30 more convictions in the Capture case are pending at the CCRC.
The third system under consideration involved an electronic terminal connected to telephone lines and was used to handle transactions such as rent, rates and utility bills.
One former Post Office employee told Computer Weekly that APS/APT was one of the first automation projects. “This came at a time when more and more people wanted to pay with smart cards,” he said.
CCRC chair Vera Baird R-KY said: “There is evidence that APS/APT can cause accounting errors. In Mr Snow's case he would say there was no evidence of any actual loss. Although Mr Snow did not raise questions about APS/APT at the time, there were accounting shortcomings which he could not explain. There appears to be no indication that Post Office Ltd made any attempt investigate other possible causes.”
The CCRC said there were “real similarities” between Snow's case and the successful 2021 Horizon appeals led by former Post Office master and campaigner Joe Hamilton, with both blaming “potentially unreliable data from Post Office systems”.
Baird added: “The Court of Appeal will now have to decide whether the conviction is dangerous and should be quashed.”
There was a mail scandal first published in Computer Weekly magazine in 2009.revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they faced due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history (see below for a timeline of Computer Weekly articles on the scandal since 2009.).
