The widower of a Post Office worker jailed after being convicted of theft has lost a court of appeal fight as a judge ruled that the conviction was not based on evidence from the scandal-hit Horizon software. Ian O’Donnell wanted to posthumously clear the name of his wife, Joanne, who died seven years ago, aged 64. Three appeal judges recently considered the case of O’Donnell, who worked at North Levenshulme Post Office in Manchester, and on Tuesday dismissed an appeal. Lord Justice Holroyde, Mr Justice Picken and Sir Nigel Davis, who heard arguments at a court of appeal hearing in London in June, were told that O’Donnell had been convicted of theft and given a seven-month jail sentence after a trial at Manchester crown court in 2007. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) had referred the case to the court of appeal after being contacted by Mr O’Donnell. A spokesperson said the case had been referred in the wake of the Horizon IT scandal. Lawyers representing the Post Office opposed the appeal. Errors made by Horizon software, which was made by tech firm Fujitsu and used by the Post Office, led to the wrongful convictions of dozens of people for false accounting and theft between 1999 and 2015. Of the more than 700 convictions between 1999 and 2015, 132 cases have been through the appeals process resulting in 83 overturned convictions and 49 unsuccessful appeals, according to the Post Office. Holroyde said in a written ruling that appeal judges had previously considered appeals against conviction by former Post Office staff prosecuted many years ago after being convicted of dishonesty offences. He said those cases raised issues about abuse of process and the safety of convictions, “having regard to concerns about the reliability” of Horizon. Appeal judges had concluded that O’Donnell’s conviction was “not a Horizon case”, he said. Mrs O’Donnell had denied wrongdoing but was convicted by a jury after a five-day trial. Judges heard that she had been an assistant working primarily at North Levenshulme Post Office. Holroyde said that, when prosecuted, she had 30 years’ experience, her record had been “impeccable”, and she had been commended for bravery when confronted by armed robbers. In November 2004, the Department for Work and Pensions had informed the Post Office that, in April and May of that year, pensions and allowance (P&A) payments had been paid at the the branch on books that had been reported as lost in transit, or as not having been handed to the customer, and which were therefore subject to a “stop notice”, he said. Payments had been made despite the notice being in force. Counterfoils had been date-stamped, and transaction logs indicated that most of the payments had been made with Mrs O’Donnell’s user ID. The judge said payments had been input manually into the Horizon accounting system, rather than by the use of a barcode scanner. Lawyers had raised a number of concerns about the safety of O’Donnell’s conviction. They included a “material failure of disclosure”, “the unreliability of Horizon data that was essential to the prosecution”, and the “poor level of investigation”. But appeal judges concluded that the conviction was safe. “In the present case, it is in our view clear that Horizon evidence was not essential to the prosecution of Mrs O’Donnell,” said Holroyde. The judge said, apart from a “brief reference” to Horizon during an interview, there “was never any suggestion on Mrs O’Donnell’s part” that the software played any role in matters. He said O’Donnell’s was not one of the “exceptional and rare cases” in which it would be appropriate to conclude that the conviction was unsafe on “abuse of process grounds”. He said: “We have read a moving letter by Mr O’Donnell, which makes clear the distress which Mrs O’Donnell and her family suffered as a result of her conviction. “We must, however, decide this appeal in accordance with the law rather than on a basis of sympathy.” He added: “We are satisfied that the conviction is safe. This appeal therefore fails and must accordingly be dismissed.”