At least 13 may have killed themselves over U.K.'s Post Office wrongful convictions scandal

At least 13 people were thought to have taken their own lives as a result of Britain's Post Office scandal, in which almost 1,000 postal employees were wrongly prosecuted or convicted of criminal wrongdoing because of a faulty computer system, a report said Tuesday.

LONDON — At least 13 people were thought to have taken their own lives as a result of Britain's Post Office scandal, in which almost 1,000 postal employees were wrongly prosecuted or convicted of criminal wrongdoing because of a faulty computer system, a report said Tuesday.

Another 59 people contemplated suicide over the scandal, one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in U.K. history.

From around 1999 to 2015, hundreds of people who worked at Post Office branches were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on evidence from a defective information technology system. Some went to prison or were forced into bankruptcy. Others lost their homes, suffered health problems or breakdowns in their relationships or became ostracized by their communities.

Retired judge Wyn Williams, who chairs a public inquiry into the scandal, said in a report published Tuesday that 13 people killed themselves as a consequence of a faulty Post Office accounting system "showing an illusory shortfall in branch accounts," according to their families.

The problems at the Post Office, which is state-owned but operates as a private business, were known for years. But the full scale of the injustice didn't become widely known until last year, when a TV docudrama propelled the scandal to national headlines and galvanized support for victims.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/least-13-killed-uks-post-office-wrongful-convictions-scandal-rcna217676


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