The Court of Appeal has rejected the Post Office’s request for an extension to the time in which it must respond to an appeal against convictions made based on its Capture software.
The Post Office’s request for a two-month extension before it delivers its formal response to the appeal of former subpostmaster Steve Marston was heavily criticised by campaigners and has now been rejected by the appeals court. But the Post Office could also appeal against this decision.
According to Marston, as it stands, the deadline is 13 May, and if the Post Office does not appeal successfully, there will be a directions hearing on 20 May for three Capture-based cases.
Marston told Computer Weekly: “I’m over the moon that the court is following this route rather than allowing the Post Office to further delay proceedings. I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to be exonerated. We’ve waited for nearly 30 years, so we just want to get on with it now and get the chance to put this episode in our lives to an end.”
The Post Office had not responded when this article was published.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred Marston’s appeal to the Court of Appeal on 27 March. Marston, who was a subpostmaster in Bury, Lancashire, used the Post Office’s faulty Capture system to do his accounts. He was convicted in 1997 for theft and false accounting, following an unexplained shortfall of nearly £80,000. Marston said he had never had any problems using the paper-based accounting system, but that changed when his branch, which he ran from 1973, began using the Capture system.
In October 2025, an appeal against the 1998 conviction of Patricia Owen, who died in 2003, was the first Capture case to be referred to the Court of Appeal. She pleaded not guilty to the theft of £6,000, but was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, at Canterbury Crown Court.
Another case has been referred since Marston’s.
