The joys of the wireless

Obviously, one’s first instinct is to agree that parliament should step in and decree that all the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted in the Post Office scandal should be exonerated without their appeals needing to be heard. But I suspect that instinct is wrong, for at least two reasons. The first is the precedent. These are individual criminal cases (though with strong common characteristics). If parliament feels it can interfere with such cases, it is usurping the process of law. Once MPs feel they can decide questions of individual guilt, where’s the end to it? Politicians cannot judge evidence to a legal standard. Justice will become politicised. The political proclamation of unproved innocence could be almost as noxious as that of unproved guilt. Think, for example, of what might happen to past terrorist cases in Northern Ireland. The second reason is that the sub-postmasters themselves deserve individual consideration of their claims.