Nearly a Thousand People Were Convicted of Stealing Over Decades. It Was a Computer Glitch.

LONDON—The U.K. government has taken the rare step of proposing a law to overturn hundreds of convictions of people running post offices across Britain who were found guilty of theft or false accounting, an attempt to rectify a miscarriage of justice that has dragged on for decades. 

Between 1999 and 2015, some 983 convictions were brought against people managing post office branches across the country, after faulty accounting software mistakenly showed money missing from their business accounts.