Carina Price

---

Carina Price was one of a group of former sub-postmasters and post-mistresses who were convicted of offences including theft, false accounting, and fraud, based on information from a computer system called Horizon which suggested that money had gone missing from post-office branch accounts. The basis of each of the prosecutions in these cases was that money missing from the branch account had been a result of theft by the sub-postmaster or mistress, or had been covered up by fraud or false accounting by the sub-postmaster or mistress.

Horizon was first installed at Ms Price’s branch on 1st August 2000. Later a shortfall of £19,355.97 was found in her accounts.

On the 30^th November 2005 she was convicted at the Crown Court in Bournemouth of 28 counts of suppression of a valuable security. On 19^th January 2006 she was sentenced to nine months imprisonment suspended for two years.

All of her her convictions were quashed when errors in the Horizon system were identified as the cause of the identified shortfall. Post Office Limited accepted that the prosecution of Mrs Price was both unfair and an affront to justice.

Ms Price said of her experience being wrongfully convicted: “It broke my marriage up. It was a very bad time. I had a breakdown over it. Before they [the Post Office investigators] came in and everything else I couldn’t understand what was going wrong and I was tearing my hair out over it and I was getting to the point where I was suicidal, because I just couldn’t work out what was going wrong.” (Source: PostOfficeTrial.com)

< Back to Case Search < Back to Overview Graph