Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice sparks outrage at last

“WE’VE JUSTITV got to trust in the British justice system and everything will be all right.” So says a wretched Lee Castleton (whose character is played by Will Mellor) in “Mr Bates v The Post Office”, a new drama about hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted in an accounting scandal between 1999 and 2015. British justice did not make everything all right for Mr Castleton. Far from it.In 2004, when “Horizon”, a new accounting system operated by Fujitsu, a Japanese technology firm, showed a loss of £25,859 ($47,397) at Mr Castleton’s branch in Bridlington, Yorkshire, the Post Office told him to make up the shortfall. He refused; it later became clear that faulty software had generated errors which he was unable to correct. Mr Castleton took his case to court. A judge ordered him to pay costs of £321,000, which bankrupted him.