By the time of Bates’s collapsing litigation, the size and the shape of the problems were clear, if still contested by POL. Unreliable evidence from Horizon had been used to take money from SPMs. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people had paid money that POL had, in effect, extorted under a pretence of legitimacy. As many as 1,000 prosecutions had taken place, often for fraud, theft, and/or false accounting, leading to over 200 people being imprisoned. Others were removed from the PO branches they had run and often invested their life savings in. The knock-on effects of debt, conviction, and social stigma were often profound. Stress-related illness, death by suicide, and profound mental health problems often followed.
Bates was bad, but in terms of questionable lawyering, it can also be seen as an example of history repeating itself. The first problem, and not one on which lawyers are often challenged, is the drafting of unfair contracts.
Unfairness Contracts and SPM Mistreatment
In Bates, Mr Justice Fraser found POL contracts unfair in various ways. POL granted itself very broad powers to suspend or terminate SPMs without compensation or clear justification. Some SPMs, including Alan Bates, were allegedly targeted for challenging shortfalls using these very discretions. The contract was also wrongly interpreted within the business as requiring payment without fault. Whether lawyers contributed to this or the threatening letters that misstated liability is not known. It would be hard to prove professional misconduct for drafting unfair contracts, not least because identifying the lawyers who did the drafting would be difficult. Nonetheless, lawyers who knowingly drafted or enforced unfair contracts may have misled or taken unfair advantage of SPMs.Footnote 1
The significance of the contractual terms is that they provided the leverage for the belligerent process that SPMs endured when faced with unexplained shortfalls: they were told to pay up or face immediate suspension, debt proceedings, or prosecution. The contracts were treated as stating that they were at fault even though the facts suggested otherwise. This legal underpinning was accompanied by a lack of any mechanism to challenge discrepancies; in essence, SPMs had to call the helpline and hope a queried transaction might be corrected weeks or even months later. The Horizon system did not provide records sufficient to allow SPMs to check whether and how errors might have occurred. It was a debt trap locked tight by contract and bureaucracy.
Civil Litigation and Enforcement
The inquiry concentrated on two crucial civil cases to illustrate POL’s approach to enforcement.
Julie Wolstenholme: The Cleveleys Case
Like Pamela Lock, Julie Wolstenholme was an early casualty of Horizon. She became SPM of the Cleveleys branch just before Horizon was introduced and soon encountered problems that led to her refusing to use Horizon. Her refusal meant she was suspended and then had her contract terminated.Footnote 2 POL issued proceedings against her in April 2001 for the return of equipment from the branch. Her defence and counter-claim alleged that Horizon was not fit for purpose.
The inquiry focused on three problems suggested by the handling of this case.
The first witness statement from Elaine Cottam gave the impression that Ms Wolstenholme’s complaints were due to user error rather than faults with Horizon. Various records supported Ms Wolstenholme’s case but were not referred to in Cottam’s statement. This was accepted as a ‘serious omission’ by POL at the inquiry.Footnote 3 Cottam suggested the statement had been drafted for her.Footnote 4 This is the first example of evidence being polished to appear helpful to the POL case, deliberately or through casual prejudice against SPMs, at the coalface by POL managers or lawyers.
The second was how POL reacted to expert evidence. Jason Coyne, a court-directed joint expert, provided a preliminary analysis of POL call logs. He said ‘the technology installed … was clearly defective …. The majority of the errors … could not be attributed to being of Mrs Wolstenholme’s making.’Footnote 5 He also indicated that POL’s helpdesk seemed ‘to be more focused on “closing calls” than attempting to get to the bottom of the continual recurrence’.Footnote 6
Rather than investigating the concerns Coyne raised, as POL accepts they should have done,Footnote 7 Fujitsu were asked for a response that might change Coyne’s mind. Rather than deal with the fundamentals, Fujitsu concentrated instead on criticising Coyne, unfairly, for ‘a very one-sided view of life’.Footnote 8 They tried to shoot the messenger.
Unsurprisingly, Coyne’s mind was unchanged, and POL, in a weak position, without evidence to rebut him, set about trying to settle the case. POL in-house lawyer, Mandy Talbot, is recorded as having wanted to ‘‘‘throw money” at [Ms Wolstenholme], to keep Mr Coyne’s expert report out of the public domain if possible, and to “keep [Ms Wolstenholme’s] mouth shut”’.Footnote 9 There is a suggestion that Ms. Wolstenholme received a substantial settlement as a result.Footnote 10
POL maintains that the settlement ‘did not mean that POL realised that [Ms Wolstenholme’s] allegations were true, only that there was insufficient evidence to contradict them’.Footnote 11 There is an alternative view. Faced with expert evidence that, as one core participant lawyer suggested, ‘the whole estate was suffering from problems’,Footnote 12 they realised Fujitsu did not have a good answer and buried the case.
Lee Castleton: The Marine Drive Branch
In 2005, SPM Lee Castleton experienced shortfalls that led him to make made ninety-one calls to the helpline over twelve weeks.Footnote 13 Frustrated with the lack of support, he requested an audit hoping that might sort the problem out. Instead, that audit led to his suspension and the termination of his contract.
POL sued Mr Castleton for nearly £27,000 in shortfalls. He counterclaimed for £250,000 to cover the effects of losing his business, raising the stakes in POL’s eyes considerably. Shortly before trial, he was forced to represent himself when legal funds ran out. He lost, was ordered to pay £320,000 in costs, and was then bankrupted in enforcement proceedings.
The first issue the inquiry focused on in this case was POL’s motives in bringing the case. Castleton says POL’s external solicitor (in what is now WBD), had told him POL would destroy him. That solicitor, Stephen Dilley, denies that. Conversely, we know that POL’s external counsel had said the case was ‘commercial madness’ and should be dropped,Footnote 14 but the organisation persisted, seemingly to defend Horizon’s reputation and discourage other SPMs from challenging the system by using the Castleton case to set an example. As Dilley is recorded as saying at the time, ‘the Post Office driver had been getting a judgment against Mr Castleton to show that the computer system wasn’t wrong and deter other subpostmasters from bringing a claim’.Footnote 15 Various other questions are raised about whether the tactics were excessive and unreasonable.Footnote 16 POL argued that the tactics Dilley deployed for them were normal for commercial litigation.Footnote 17
The second issue is how the case was put to the court by POL’s Counsel, Richard Morgan. Counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, called this his ‘nice little legal point’. Castleton’s counsel called it a legal ‘sleight of hand’.Footnote 18
In essence, Mr Morgan relied on a legal rule that says an agent signing a statement of account bears the burden of proving that the account he has signed is false. It was an argument that looks very weak in hindsight: SPMs were required to sign the statements, they had no means of formally disputing the accounts, Castleton had disputed them via the helpline, and the Horizon system did not provide evidence that enabled SPMs to conduct proper checks – points that, as a litigant in person, Mr Castleton tried to make at his trial.
Richard Morgan, presumably unwittingly, reinforced the problem with his framing when he defended the strategy before the inquiry: ‘I was asked to prove the case that I did on the basis of documents signed by Mr Castleton, whose truth were not challenged by Mr Castleton.’Footnote 19 Beer reminds him elsewhere in his testimony that, on the contrary, their truth was challenged:Footnote 20
But that was his case, wasn’t it? It wasn’t only something that emerged years later before Mr Justice Fraser and it may be that it wasn’t very well articulated by Mr Castleton, being a litigant in person, but showing you the two things I have, the opening and the evidence, the evidence and the point were there, weren’t they?
Morgan suggests he did not understand or appreciate this at the time. Castleton’s lawyers suggest in submissions to the inquiry at the end of Phase IV:Footnote 21
This answer identifies why Morgan did not want to remember the truth: he did not have the evidence to support the contention that Horizon was reliable, and so if proving that contention was POL’s purpose in running the litigation, it was a collateral purpose, tactically unworthy, and an abuse of the process of the court.
Whatever the background to Morgan’s handling of the case, his central claim about the case strategy he develops is that it was simply a clean way to prove a debt.
The agency argument was accepted by the judge in Mr Castleton’s case but was de facto rejected when more thoroughly tested in Bates. One of the reasons Mr Justice Fraser deploys against the idea that Horizon provided a statement of account in legal terms is that ‘the Post Office argue for a construction that would impose an impossible burden upon SPMs’.Footnote 22
The third point is that the strategy was developed against a background of uncertainty about, and potentially damaging evidence on, Horizon. There is evidence suggesting that the case was issued prematurely:Footnote 23 Mandy Talbot blamed solicitors Bond Pearce (as was) for issuing a claim ‘when reliability was unclear’.Footnote 24 Talbot is also documented as pointing out that losing the Castleton case would mean that ‘the ability of POL to rely on Horizon for data will be compromised and the future prosperity of the network compromised’.Footnote 25 And she apparently told POL’s external solicitor, Stephen Dilley, thatFootnote 26 PO must not show any weakness and even if this case will cost a lot, there are broader issues at stake other than just Castleton’s claim: if the PO are seen to compromise on Castleton, then ‘the whole system will come crashing down’.
Mr Morgan also asked questions about the Horizon system and the ‘integrity of the Fujitsu product’, but ‘didn’t get answers’ and ‘the issue seemed to fall away’.Footnote 27 He received general assurances that there was a firm belief that Horizon was robust and that there were no problems with Lee Castleton’s system.Footnote 28
At one stage during the inquiry, Mr Morgan indicated his general approach to exploring adverse evidence:Footnote 29
I’m trying to find out what’s going on. I’m saying what – you know, without being so crude as to say ‘Give me full and frank disclosure’, I want to know are there any unexploded landmines that I’m going to step on if I go down a particular course? Is there anything that’s going to come out that I should know about now? Generally, with sophisticated firms of solicitors, they know that that’s what you’re asking them when you say, ‘What’s out there?’ I think I would have assumed that with Mr Beezer and Mr Dilley.
The inquiry also focused on disclosure issues in the case. Helpdesk call logs indicating widespread problems were withheld from disclosure. POL’s legal team persuaded the judge to exclude testimony from other SPMs, knowing that they held evidence about problems in other SPMs’ branches that might otherwise be disclosable. Fujitsu engineer Anne Chambers revealed concerns about the trial to her employers.Footnote 30
Lee Castleton’s lawyers submitted to the inquiry that pursing Mr Castleton knowing ‘there was [undisclosed] expert evidence as to [Horizon’s] unreliability’ from Jason Coyne in the Marine Drive case was ‘conduct which had a tendency to pervert the course of justice’.Footnote 31 POL indicated that the inquiry may find Mandy Talbot’s evidence on the failure to disclose here ‘unconvincing’.Footnote 32
Instead, POL pursued the case as Castleton’s health suffered and he was financially ruined. After winning, POL sought to maximise the case’s impact, hoping it would deter future claims. Morgan later advised POL on how to defend against growing concerns about Horizon’s accuracy, reinforcing the same flawed legal strategy. The case was not just about recovering debt – it was a battle to protect a faulty system, indifferent to the consequences for those affected. It provided a legal and evidential framework for a ‘flat earth’ strategy and enforceable debt without the need to prove it, and in a way that denied its opponents the evidence they were entitled to. Against Lee Castleton, it had succeeded.
Criminal Investigation and Prosecutions
It is a bleak irony that Lee Castleton may have escaped an even worse fate. Audits, which were limited and largely ignored Horizon reliability questions, typically led to investigatory interviews often conducted on the same day. These could lead to suspensions, and they could also then lead to interviews under caution and prosecution.
This process was carried out by the POL investigation team. This team was incentivised by performance-based bonuses to maximise recovery of shortfall debts. The team handled the initial probes before passing on investigation files for decisions on charging SPMs with criminal offences. In England, PO lawyers – both in-house and external – conducted most prosecutions, though public prosecutors were involved in some cases, particularly in Scotland (via the Crown Office) and in England and Wales, via the Department for Work and Pensions and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Prosecutions using Horizon data began in 2000 and ended in 2013. Charges included theft, fraud, and false accounting. They were often based solely on Horizon data, sometimes accompanied by questionable admissions from interviews. POL frequently accepted guilty pleas to false accounting while dropping more serious charges, particularly where SPMs agreed to pay alleged shortfalls to POL. Some had to agree not to criticise Horizon or say that they had had the allegedly missing money when they had not. This was a strategy that minimised criticism of Horizon and maximised shortfall recovery. It also inhibited proper pleas in mitigation on behalf of the defendants.
It is now common ground that the process of prosecutions involved multiple failures, including flawed interviews, poor investigative practices, wrongful charges, inadequate disclosure, misuse of expert evidence, and improperly requiring defendants to avoid criticising Horizon as a plea condition.Footnote 33
Interviews Not Conducted Fairly or Properly
There were various problems with POL investigations. POL excluded independent legal representation at the initial disciplinary interview,Footnote 34 though interviews under caution were supposed to be PACE compliant.Footnote 35 Some SPMs were dissuaded from bringing support people or legal representation to interviews. The contract forbade it at disciplinary interviews. Some were told it would be an admission of guilt if they brought legal representation. Interviews could last hours, and some SPMs were interviewed multiple times. The trauma from all this runs deep with them.
Dubious and improper tactics were deployed. Interviewers relied on misleading or inaccurate information to pressurise SPMs.Footnote 36 Many SPMs were told by a variety of PO personnel, including investigators, that they were the only ones experiencing Horizon problems.Footnote 37 Admissions were extracted under pressure. SPMs were told to admit to errors or face charges of theft.Footnote 38, Footnote 39 David Blakey was asked about an adulterous relationship and gambling debts (both imagined by the investigator) before being encouraged to confess or have them investigate his ill wife (who would then be asked about his fabricated adultery and gambling problem).Footnote 40 ‘Time and again, subpostmasters were aggressively accused of lying, simply because they could not explain where the money had gone.’Footnote 41
POL now accepts that some interviews were inappropriate, but says that others ‘may have been firm rather than oppressive’.Footnote 42 They still maintain that some admissions are reliable.Footnote 43
Charging and Prosecuting
Investigations were reviewed by a lawyer prior to charge. This key protection was flawed. Evidence suggested the reviews were cursory. Cases were charged where there was no proof of actual loss beyond Horizon data. Investigators sometimes explicitly noted a lack of evidence of dishonesty, yet the lawyers charged anyway. Where SPMs or red-flag events raised concerns about Horizon that should have been investigated, explicitly or implicitly, those other lines of defence were ignored.Footnote 44 No effort was made to track missing funds or investigate alternative explanations for shortfalls.Footnote 45
Defended cases were seen as existential risks to the organisation. One attendance note records that ‘it is absolutely vital that we win as a failure could bring the whole of the Royal Mail system down’.Footnote 46 An infamous memo from POL’s criminal lawyer, Jarnail Singh, crowed about the successful prosecution of Seema Misra as ‘an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system’ which had been destroyed, and hoped that ‘the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon’.Footnote 47
Attacks on Horizon were not unprecedented in civil or criminal cases. Misra’s case was unusual in its use of expert evidence to try and mount a robust defence. Moreover, the inquiry has started to expose a significant number of acquittals in cases that the evidence suggests POL criminal lawyers either ignored or failed to learn lessons from.Footnote 48
Failures to Disclose
Prosecutors must disclose material that comes to light if it casts doubt upon the safety of the conviction, and all criminal investigators and prosecutors are obliged to properly maintain and retain disclosure records.Footnote 49 These obligations, the Court of Appeal decided in the Hamilton case, were not met, and on occasion were not met deliberately.Footnote 50
Disclosure of Horizon audit data was resisted or limited improperly.Footnote 51 Specific evidence of problems with Horizon material at the defendant’s branch were not disclosed.Footnote 52, Footnote 53 Critical records of Horizon errors (so-called PEAKs, a databased of product errors issues in Horizon that required attention) and KELs (‘Known Error Logs’) were not disclosed.Footnote 54 Remote access was not disclosed.Footnote 55, Footnote 56 Objections to disclosure were made on improper grounds of cost and convenience, not law.Footnote 57
POL systems seemed to encourage the recording of sensitive information in ways designed to reduce chances of disclosure to SPMs. ‘Significant failures’ in POL systems, some of which might also pose risks to POL’s security, were confined to a ‘confidential offender report’ rather than appearing in ‘disciplinary reports’.Footnote 58 Contrary to much evidence before the inquiry, POL said this was to ensure such concerns were properly reviewed for disclosure in criminal cases, rather than the opposite.Footnote 59 If that was the intention, it does not appear to have worked.
Disclosure problems were general and persistent, but there was a particularly concerning episode about a receipt and payment mismatch (RPM) bug just before Seema Misra’s trial in 2010. Mrs Misra’s trial took place at a sensitive time. Press and political interest in Horizon was growing. A note of a meeting days before the Misra trial discussed an RPM bug which ‘if widely known could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon System by branches’, as well as having a ‘potential impact upon ongoing legal cases where branches are disputing the integrity of Horizon Data’; additionally, ‘it could provide branches ammunition to blame Horizon for future discrepancies.’Footnote 60 The attendees at the meeting discussed using covert remote access to cover up the bug that had been discovered, but we are told they decided against it.
It is clear this note came to the attention of the criminal law team within POL, Rob Wilson (head of the criminal team at the time) and Jamail Singh, who were sent an email about ‘repercussions in future prosecuted cases and on the integrity of Horizon on our system’.Footnote 61 The email was printed out from Singh’s computer immediately before Mrs Misra’s trial, but Singh denies seeing it.Footnote 62
It was not disclosed in the Misra case. The expert witness in the Misra trial for the PO was Gareth Jenkins. He had been involved in the RPM meeting shortly before the trial. On the day of the trial the defence applied for the trial to be stayed because of inadequate disclosure of Horizon data to their expert.Footnote 63 The court dismissed that application and Mrs Misra’s expert was encouraged to try and resolve matters through discussion with Gareth Jenkins instead. The RPM bug related to the version of Horizon (sometimes called legacy Horizon) that pre-dated the one being used in Seema Misra’s case (Horizon Online, brought in in 2010). By the time of the Hamilton case they had conceded it ought to have been disclosed.Footnote 64 Whether it was Horizon Online or legacy Horizon, it showed the potential for serious bugs that caused phantom shortfalls.
On disclosure more generally, the Court of Appeal concluded that:Footnote 65
It was POL’s clear duty to investigate all reasonable lines of enquiry, to consider disclosure and to make disclosure to the appellants of anything which might reasonably be considered to undermine its case. Yet it does not appear that POL adequately considered or made relevant disclosure of problems with or concerns about Horizon in any of the cases at any point during that period. On the contrary, it consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable. Nor does it appear that any attempt was made to investigate the assertions of SPMs that there must be a problem with Horizon. The consistent failure of POL to be open and honest about the issues affecting Horizon can in our view only be explained by a strong reluctance to say or do anything which might lead to other SPMs knowing about those issues. Those concerned with prosecutions of SPMs clearly wished to be able to maintain the assertion that Horizon data was accurate, and effectively steamrolled over any SPM who sought to challenge its accuracy.
The court agreed this went further than ‘“simple” non-disclosure’; it indicated ‘institutional reluctance … to investigate and disclose anything which would or could compromise the perceived integrity of Horizon’.Footnote 66 The court comes close to suggesting that the decisions were made in bad faith.Footnote 67
Plea Bargaining
Inadequate investigation and disclosure was central to POL’s reversal of the burden of proof on SPMs in criminal cases. In criminal cases, the rules against such an approach are clear. And, the Court of Appeal noted, ‘many may well have felt that they had no real alternative but to plead guilty on the most favourable basis which could be agreed with POL’.Footnote 68
This led to coercive plea deals influenced by what the Court of Appeal, perhaps naively at the time, was ‘not persuaded … [was] an improper financial motivation for pursuing prosecutions’.Footnote 69 A mixture of POL concessions and Court of Appeal’s findings showed ‘unacceptable’, ‘irrational’, and ‘improper’ approaches to prosecution and plea with evidence of undue pressure.Footnote 70 Keeping ‘open the threat of the theft charge’ was leverage in plea deals.Footnote 71 It was often dropped for a plea to false accounting. Plea deals required defendants to forego criticism of Horizon when making pleas in mitigation in ways sometimes improper and designed to enforce repayment.Footnote 72 In essence, plea deals stifled the public airing of computer errors and sought to maximise commercial recoveries for the PO.
Gareth Jenkins
Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins provided expert evidence in criminal cases, usually in writing, and sometimes engaging in less formal discussion with an opposing expert. In Seema Misra’s trial, he gave oral evidence. In July 2013, Simon Clarke, a barrister working for Cartwright King, had given POL written advice on what I am going to call ‘the Gareth Jenkins Problems’.Footnote 73 He gave several written pieces of advice. This is the one typically called ‘the Clarke Advice’. This advice was first disclosed to SPM lawyers in the Hamilton proceedings in November 2020.Footnote 74
The Clarke Advice began to reveal why the lawyers in Bates had been anxious not to call Jenkins, still less have him cross-examined. Clarke said Mr Jenkins had failed to comply with his duties as an expert witness and that this had profound implications for POL prosecutions past, present, and future. He had failed to disclose evidence of bugs that he was aware of and had made statements that could be said to be misleading. In quashing Seema Misra’s conviction, the Court of Appeal highlighted the fact that ‘Mr Jenkins gave sworn evidence to the jury’ as one reason they saw this as a ‘compelling case of the sort of prosecutorial misconduct that undermines public confidence in the criminal justice system’.Footnote 75 Clarke had said: Dr Jenkins’ credibility as an expert witness is fatally undermined. He should not be asked to provide expert evidence in any current or future prosecution.Footnote 76
Mr Clarke was praised for his robust advice on the Jenkins problem and other advice dealing with suggestions of shredding disclosure documents by POL’s Director of Security, John Scott, which is discussed in the next section. For now, let us focus on what was revealed in the inquiry about why Jenkins’ evidence may not have been complete. What becomes clear is that POL’s legal team had fundamentally mismanaged expert evidence, using Fujitsu technicians to avoid disclosing technical details. Lawyers shaped expert reports, encouraged partisanship, and suggested changes to strengthen POL’s case – without disclosing those alterations as they were required to.
In Misra’s case, the counsel instructed by POL, Warwick Tatford, was examined in the inquiry on his apparent failure to ensure Jenkins was properly advised of his obligations of independence and his duty to the court. Tatford’s own comments on Jenkins’ draft report show he actively influenced the language; the suggestion being put by counsel to the inquiry was that this was to harden evidence against defendants. POL’s final submissions said that whilst it was not ‘inherently improper’ to suggest changes to the expert report, one would need to make such changes available for disclosure, which was not done, and conceded that:Footnote 77 “the partisan way that Mr Jenkins was instructed to attack or discredit a defendant’s case, as opposed to reviewing the evidence and forming an independent expert opinion, represented a regrettable and improper understanding of the role of an expert on the part of POL’s criminal law team.”
Expert reports are supposed to comply with a set of requirements that demonstrate their independence, such as clear statements of the material they have relied on and assessments of the limits of their own opinions. Jenkins’ witness statements showed none (or very few) of these essential hallmarks of expert evidence. Tatford admits compliance with these rules was ‘nowhere near’ satisfactory. Asked at one stage whether advice given to Jenkins on his role was ‘risible’, Mr Tatford described it as ‘disastrous’.Footnote 78 It leads to one of the more meaningful apologies given to the inquiry:
I’ve actually found – I’ve actually found the exercise – and it’s been quite a demanding exercise to do witness statement and go through matters – I have found that’s clarified my mind as to what happened and, when I said I felt ashamed, I do. I actually feel worse because it’s become quite clear in the way that the evidence is properly been put before me that there are many failings that I had ignored on my part and I perhaps created a rosier version in my memory that wasn’t really there.
I apologise unreservedly for what happened. …
I have changed my view. It’s taken me a long time. I suspect I was in denial for a long time, perhaps in a self-justificatory way, and I apologise for that.
Conclusions
Lawyers like to say, particularly when they come in for criticism, that they simply advise on the law. In reality, it is not just the law that they trade on. Uncertainty is what lawyers deal in. They advise on it, and they help their clients act on (or despite) it. Sometimes they manufacture it or exploit it.
Not all of this is illegitimate. A defence lawyer’s role is to focus on any reasonable doubt in the prosecution case against their client, for instance. Their handling of uncertainty is, though, subject to rules. We speak of lawyers’ ethics, but they are also properly understood as rules. Laws.
In the PO case alarm bells began to ring when Mr Justice Fraser said the Bates group litigation was based on a ‘flat earth case’ involving unreliable witnesses and dubious tactics. The Court of Appeal’s Hamilton judgment captures the PO’s ‘failures of investigation and disclosure’, as:Footnote 79 so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the ‘Horizon cases’ an affront to the conscience of the court. By representing Horizon as reliable, and refusing to countenance any suggestion to the contrary, POL effectively sought to reverse the burden of proof.
Understanding how the reversal of the burden of proof is a multi-layered phenomenon often involving lawyers is an important part of understanding the deep-seated nature of the ethical problems revealed in the cases. At multiple stages of preparation and action against SPMs they were prejudiced by the presumption of their guilt. At root, what we see is lawyers seeing their job as taking maximum advantage of any factual or legal uncertainty for their clients, paying scant regard to any other obligations and sometimes disregarding what the facts are or the law quite plainly required of them. They created illusions of probity, propriety, and legality where none existed.
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