The post office scandal - where were the lawyers?

It is fantastic that one of the greatest mass miscarriages of justice in English legal history is finally getting the public and governmental attention it deserves, with some degree of resolution for the surviving victims and their families. It has taken way too long of course but at least it is finally happening.

Alongside righting the many wrongs that have been done, there are equally important questions to answer about how it was allowed to happen in the first place. Given the scale of the scandal there will be many people and groups of people with questions to answer. Not least among those groups is the lawyers involved for the Post Office, both in terms of continuing to pursue prosecutions notwithstanding the increasing awareness of the unreliability of the Horizon software, and then in how they reported at various stages and in various contexts on what was going on. Lawyers are rightly held to the highest ethical standards. We need to understand when and how those standards failed to be maintained here, not to scapegoat those involved as much as to learn lessons so this does not happen again.

I am no expert on lawyer ethics. But, as they say, I know a man who is. Richard Moorhead is the leading academic voice on lawyer ethics in the UK and has been heavily involved in campaigning to get the scandal addressed. If you want some help thinking about the role of the lawyers in all of this and what went wrong, I'd highly recommend his substack here - Where were the lawyers? 23 questions... (substack.com). And I have just heard he may be on Newsnight this evening which will surely be worth a watch