Hello and welcome back to page 94. This is the Paul Foot Award mini series. We are interviewing six brilliant journalists about the stories that have got them shortlisted for a Paul Foot Award this year. Let's see who's in at number five.

Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. My name's Adam Behavsky. I'm a freelance journalist and my stories were published in the lead and the big issue.

And what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award this year?

So the story that's brought me to the Paul Foot Awards,

I try to answer the question of what happens when the state wrongly punishes you?

What does it ultimately owe you?

And I told the stories of free people who had been wrongly

convicted of a crime and then were deprived of their liberty for many years. And after all that,

a very long battle to overturn their convictions, they were told that they weren't eligible for

any compensation for the government.

How did you first find out about this?

So I was looking into this in 2024 when the post office scandal was dominating the headlines.

And like many people, I wanted to understand how was it that post office scandal victims

were struggling so much to get compensation?

And I was surprised to find that the government had for decades administered a compensation scheme.

And so that made me question, why did it have to kind of create bespoke compensation schemes just for the post office scandal victims?

And so I sent a freedom information request to the Ministry of Justice asking them

how many post office scandal victims had applied for compensation through this scheme

and how many had been successful.

And they told me that a handful of applied and all of them had been rejected through this

scheme.

And then that's when

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