he Post Office continued to accuse him of stealing, forcing him to plead guilty under duress. This conviction marked the end of his career and had lasting damage to his reputation. Despite his family’s campaign to clear his name in subsequent years, he died before receiving justice.
Tracy Felstead was accused of stealing £11,500 from the Post Office branch in which she worked when she was 19 years old in 2001. She had only been working there a few months and said that she was bullied into making a false confession by Post Office investigators and the police. They allegedly told her that if she didn’t confess, the police would take her younger sister away from her mother. She was jailed for six months but managed to start a new life after this. In 2019, her conviction, which was based on the problematic Horizon computer system, was overturned, and she was reimbursed for lost earnings.
Following his false conviction for theft and false accounting in 2005, Simon Clarke’s life changed dramatically. As a postmaster, he had signed a contract of trust with the Post Office in exchange for his salary. His contract was terminated, and he was ordered to pay back the missing £11,500. Subsequently, Simon was forced to sell his family’s property – a pub that had been in his family for generations – to pay off the debt. There was also the ongoing stress and anxiety that came with his court case. Even though he knew that he was innocent, he couldn’t help anymore. Eventually, after years of fighting, Simon was finally exonerated.
One of the victims of the Post Office scandal was Rubina Shaheen. She was wrongfully convicted of theft in 2010, and for years, she tried to prove her innocence. Shaheen claimed that Horizon had discrepancies in the accounts, but the Post Office didn’t listen to her. After being wrongfully convicted by a judge, she lost her home, got a criminal record, and almost lost her children. Rubina spent three and a half years fighting her conviction, and in 2021, it was finally overturned by the Court of Appeal. She expressed relief that she can now rebuild her life, but there was a point when she almost gave up.
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