Seema Misra, who used to manage a Post Office in England, was wrongly jailed while pregnant.
She recently refused to accept the apology from Gareth Jenkins, the engineer whose evidence led to her wrongful conviction.
Misra’s conviction was overturned in 2021 after being accused of stealing GBP 75,000. In the ongoing public inquiry, she expressed that Jenkins’ apology came “too little, too late.”
“Nobody can understand it,” she said of the ordeal she went through and said Jenkins could have apologised “ages ago”.
Her reaction followed a written witness statement submitted to the Post Office Inquiry by Jenkins, in which he said: “I did not know that Mrs Misra was pregnant at the time of her conviction and only learned of this many years later.”
“This makes what has happened even more tragic. I can only apologise, again, to Mrs Misra and her family for what happened to her.”
Earlier, Misra had rejected a similar apology from former Post Office Managing Director David Smith for a congratulatory email he sent after her conviction.
“I was eight weeks pregnant – they need to apologise to my youngest son. It was terrible. I haven’t accepted the apologies,” Misra said at the time in April.
“We had my conviction overturned, nobody came at that time to apologise. And now they just suddenly realised that when they have to appear in a public inquiry, they have to apologise,” she said.
Misra gave birth to her second child while in Bronzefield prison in south-east England, serving four-and-a-half months.
Smith told the inquiry that Misra had been used as a “test case” and the success of the case led to more confidence in the faulty Horizon IT accounting system.
“How can they do a test on a human being? I’m a living creature. I heard that my case has been used as a test case before. But hearing it again and again, it’s just annoying. It makes me more and more angry, to be honest,” Misra added.
Recall that earlier this year, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised to take action in the historic scandal that wrongly accused sub-postmasters of fraud.
A public inquiry is currently on the case, which would be concluded in July.
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