A post office operator who was wrongly prosecuted while pregnant has rejected a Post Office executive’s apology for having sent an email celebrating her conviction as “brilliant news”.
The inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal heard that David Smith, who was managing director of the Post Office for seven months during 2010, sent the email to his team after learning that Seema Misra had been convicted.
She was later sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant. She was put on suicide watch after collapsing in court. Her case was among those overturned by the court of appeal in 2021.
The inquiry is looking into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators who were hounded for more than a decade because of shortfalls in their branch accounts that were due to bugs in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.
Misra rejected Smith’s apology, telling Sky News: “They are apologising now but they missed so many chances before. We had my conviction overturned, nobody came at that time to apologise.”
The UK government has introduced legislation that will exonerate post office operators who were prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018. The new law is expected to come into force by late July.
[Ed: More evidence for banning the imprisonment of pregnant women and those with dependent children for anything less than the most serious violent crimes.]
Source: Post office operator wrongly jailed while pregnant rejects executive’s apology