‘Pregnant thief’ scandal raises vital issues of fairness

Instead of hosting a party to celebrate her son’s tenth birthday Seema Misra was sent to prison. She was eight weeks pregnant.

What was her crime? She had run the village post office in West Byfleet, but had unaccountable shortfalls in her accounts. She put in £20,000 from her family savings to resolve the issue, but the problems continued and, eventually, she was convicted of stealing £74,000. The local newspaper described her as the ‘pregnant thief’. Her life was in tatters.

In what has been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, Seema was one of the hundreds falsely accused by the Post Office because of the failed Horizon computer system. The lives of these subpostmasters were devastated, life savings handed over, livelihoods lost, reputations shattered, marriages broken, mental health destroyed; there were even suicides. One former churchwarden described having to leave his village and church because of the hostility against him.