Nearly a Thousand People Were Convicted of Stealing Over Decades. It Was a Computer Glitch.

LONDONThe U.K. government has taken the rare step of proposing a law to overturn hundreds of convictions of people running post offices across Britain who were found guilty of theft or false accounting, an attempt to rectify a miscarriage of justice that has dragged on for decades..

Between 1999 and 2015, some 983 convictions were brought against people managing post office branches across the country, after faulty accounting software mistakenly showed money missing from their business accounts..

The convictions devastated the lives of hundreds of postmasters and postmistresseswho were self-employed and operated local post offices like a franchisemany of whom were driven into bankruptcy, and some of whom ended up in jail..

The Post Office, which is state-owned, for years denied the Horizon computer systemrun by Japanese software company Fujitsuhad a glitch, and pursued its postmasters in court, often through an obscure internal judicial system that allowed it to try, investigate and convict postmasters without going through the police or the local courts.Fujitsu has apologized for its role in their suffering," a spokesman for the company said..

. Josephine Hamilton, a postmistress who was convicted of false accounting and given a suspended sentence, was forced to remortgage her house and asked family to help her pay an ever-growing bill to the Post Office for money the computer system kept saying was missing..

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