Kent postmaster's conviction overturned

Sunil Patel ran a Post Office in St Mary’s Bay when he was wrongly convicted.   Finn Macdiarmid  reports.

Transcript

00:00Over a decade of being a wrongly convicted criminal, and now he's a free man.

00:05After the Horizon IT scandal branded, at the time, sub-postmaster Sunil Patel a criminal,

00:11he's now received a letter telling him his convictions have been quashed.

00:14He's one of more than 700 people who were wrongly convicted because of the faulty Horizon IT system,

00:20and it completely changed the course of his life.

00:24I had to do a seven-and-a-half-month sentence, and then the rest of it I was allowed out on a tag.

00:32It was still on a curfew, so it was like between seven to seven, so I couldn't go out.

00:38But all this affected us badly. It's the stigma of being a criminal now.

00:45They'll always be saying, oh, that's the postmaster who stole the money.

00:49And what was your reaction when the letters came through and it told you that the conviction had been overturned?

00:55That was the best moment of my life. You just felt like you just won the lottery.

01:00It's like the emotions, all the weight's gone off your shoulder.

01:06And the impact on your family, you said you had a six-year-old at the time.

01:10Yeah, so three daughters. The oldest was just finishing first-year uni,

01:15and she was going to sit back a year so she could help in the shop.

01:19My middle daughter was in her second year A-levels. That impacted her a bit.

01:24And my youngest was just six, and my mum moved down from London to take her to school

01:32and bring her home and do the things that I would have done if I was at home.

01:36Yeah, the impact was that. It was the day-to-day that was hard.

01:42He had all but lost hope, with his face on national newspapers, even in his own newsagents,

01:46and his finances heavily impacted until a drama was released on ITV earlier this year.

01:52I must say this. It's all thanks to that TV programme about Alan Bates.

01:59He changed everything. I think without that programme, this wouldn't have happened.

02:05Despite all the clear positives of the conviction being quashed for Sunil and his family,

02:09the process has been a slow one, with only financial compensation set to take plenty of time.

02:15The redress compensation, it's like 15 years ago, all the losses you suffered,

02:20how much losses have you... what position you would be in now if that incident didn't happen to you.

02:27Again, it's going to take a... I can see it taking at least a few more years before we get anything.

02:32Questions will also be drawn about the prosecution of those who knew the system was faulty.

02:37But for now, Sunil is just relieved his life can start to go back to normal.

02:41Finn McDermid for KMTV in Littlestone.