How one man’s later crime can cast a shadow over people still fighting to prove their innocence.

Monday, 19 October 2026

I’m still waiting for a reply from the Single Justice Service.

At this point, waiting has become something of a recurring theme in my dealings with the justice system.

I’ve made enquiries, obtained account references and supplied information in an attempt to establish the details of historical court proceedings associated with my name.

And now I wait.

There’s only so much time you can spend checking for an email that hasn’t arrived, so I did what any sensible person might do.

I started scrolling through YouTube.

Somewhere between the usual recommendations, I came across the case of a man called Shaurn Thomas.

And what began as a little casual viewing turned into something considerably more troubling.

Because I’ve also been thinking about cases here in Britain involving prisoners whose convictions I believe deserve serious reconsideration.

People who maintain their innocence.

People who may have spent years trying to get somebody to listen.

People who, if their convictions are eventually overturned, might simply want to go home and get on with whatever remains of their lives.

And I couldn’t help wondering whether a case like Thomas’s, even on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, could make that struggle more difficult.

Not necessarily through any change in the law.

But through something much harder to measure.

Public confidence.

1. Shaurn Thomas: The First Murder Conviction

In November 1990, a Philadelphia businessman named Domingo Martinez was murdered during a robbery.

Shaurn Thomas, who was sixteen at the time of the killing, was eventually convicted in connection with the crime.

In 1994, he received a life sentence.

Thomas maintained that he had not committed the murder.

He said he had been at a juvenile detention facility at the relevant time, following his arrest in connection with an unrelated incident.

That was an alibi which, if properly established, could have fundamentally changed the case against him.

But his conviction stood.

For years.

Then decades.

Eventually, lawyers working with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project began examining the case.

They uncovered serious problems, including evidence relevant to Thomas’s alibi and concerns about the testimony used against him.

In 2017, his conviction was overturned and the prosecution subsequently dismissed the charges.

Thomas walked free after approximately twenty-four years in prison.

It was the kind of case that demonstrates why post-conviction review matters.

The original verdict had been reached.

The appeals process had failed to correct it for years.

But further investigation eventually exposed sufficient problems for the conviction to be set aside.

Philadelphia later settled Thomas’s civil lawsuit for approximately $4.1 million.

For somebody who had lost so much of his adult life to imprisonment, there was finally an opportunity to start again.

Or so it appeared.

2. The Second Murder

In January 2023, a man named Akeem Edwards was shot and killed in Philadelphia.

He was thirty-eight years old.

Thomas was subsequently charged in connection with his death.

And in December 2024, Thomas pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and related offences.

According to the prosecution’s account, the killing arose from a dispute over a $1,200 drug debt.

The contrast was extraordinary.

A man whose previous murder conviction had been overturned, who had received millions of dollars in compensation and whose release had been associated with the work of innocence campaigners, had admitted responsibility for killing another person.

It is a deeply disturbing story.

And we shouldn’t allow the controversy surrounding Thomas to obscure the person who died.

Akeem Edwards had a family.

He had people who loved him.

His death was not merely an unfortunate complication in somebody else’s narrative of exoneration.

It was a murder, and Thomas admitted his guilt.

But the story also creates an uncomfortable question.

What happens when somebody who has been recognised as wrongfully convicted subsequently commits a serious crime?

Does it change how we think about the original case?

And, perhaps more importantly, does it change how we think about everybody else who says they’ve been wrongly convicted?

3. Two Crimes, Two Separate Questions

This is where I think we need to be particularly careful.

Thomas’s guilty plea in the killing of Akeem Edwards does not establish that he committed the murder of Domingo Martinez in 1990.

Those are two different crimes.

They involved different victims, different evidence and different proceedings.

The fact that somebody commits a crime in 2023 cannot, by itself, prove what they did or did not do in 1990.

It might affect how people perceive their character.

It might influence public opinion.

But it does not repair the evidential problems that caused the earlier conviction to be overturned.

There is also a distinction between overturning a conviction and conclusively proving every detail of a person’s innocence.

Thomas’s original case involved serious concerns about the reliability of the conviction. Prosecutors agreed it should be vacated and declined to retry him, although they did not claim every question about the original killing had been definitively answered.

Those distinctions matter.

The justice system should not require us to decide whether somebody is a good person before examining whether their conviction is safe.

Nor should a later crime automatically validate an earlier prosecution.

A conviction has to stand or fall on the evidence relevant to that conviction.

Anything else risks turning justice into a character assessment conducted with hindsight.

4. The Problem for People Still Claiming Innocence

This is the part of the story that concerns me most.

Imagine somebody sitting in a British prison today.

They maintain that they didn’t commit the crime for which they were convicted.

Perhaps they have been trying for years to obtain a review.

Perhaps there are concerns about forensic evidence, witness testimony, disclosure failures or the way their trial was conducted.

Perhaps those concerns are well founded.

Perhaps they aren’t.

The point is that they deserve to be examined on their merits.

Now imagine a member of the public reading about Shaurn Thomas.

They see that he was released after a murder conviction was overturned.

They see that he received millions of dollars.

And then they see that he subsequently admitted to another murder.

It’s not difficult to imagine the reaction.

So much for exoneration.

They let him out, gave him millions, and look what happened.

That reaction is understandable at an emotional level.

But it becomes dangerous when it turns into a general assumption about other cases.

Because the next person seeking exoneration is not Shaurn Thomas.

Their evidence is not his evidence.

Their conviction is not his conviction.

And their future conduct cannot be predicted simply by looking at what another person did after release.

I cannot establish that Thomas’s case has caused any particular British appeal to fail or any specific innocence campaign to lose support.

That would require evidence I don’t have.

But I do worry about the possibility that high-profile stories like this influence the atmosphere in which other claims are heard.

Not necessarily in a courtroom.

Perhaps in the press.

Perhaps among potential supporters.

Perhaps in the minds of people deciding whether a prisoner deserves another chance to have their evidence examined.

And perhaps even in the willingness of ordinary people to believe that miscarriages of justice happen at all.

5. Britain Has Its Own Reasons to Take Wrongful Convictions Seriously

We don’t need to look to America to find examples of serious failures in criminal justice.

Consider the case of Rachel Manning, who was murdered in Milton Keynes in December 2000.

Barri White was convicted of her murder, while Keith Hyatt was convicted of perverting the course of justice.

Both convictions were eventually quashed.

White was acquitted at a retrial in 2008.

In 2013, Shahidul Ahmed was convicted of Rachel Manning’s murder.

The original investigation and prosecution had relied in part on forensic interpretations that later came under serious challenge.

It’s an example of how a conviction can appear secure until somebody examines the assumptions beneath the evidence.

And it reminds us why a criminal justice system needs mechanisms for correcting mistakes.

I have been thinking about cases like this, and about other prisoners in Britain whose claims of innocence I find troubling.

But I also recognise the limits of what I can know from documentaries, published reports and material available to the public.

Believing that a conviction may be unsafe is not the same thing as proving that the person convicted is innocent.

That’s precisely why proper investigation matters.

We should be neither automatically credulous nor automatically dismissive.

We should examine the evidence.

And if the evidence reveals a serious problem, we should be prepared to reconsider the verdict.

Even when doing so is uncomfortable.

6. Exoneration Is Not a Certificate of Good Character

Perhaps this is the most important distinction in the entire story.

When somebody’s conviction is overturned, the legal system is addressing a particular prosecution.

It is not issuing a guarantee that the person will never commit a crime.

It is not declaring that they possess exceptional moral character.

And it is certainly not promising that the rest of their life will be free from mistakes.

People who have been wrongfully convicted are still people.

Some will rebuild their lives successfully.

Some will struggle.

Some may commit offences later.

None of those possibilities makes it acceptable to imprison someone for a crime that has not been properly proved against them.

We should also be cautious about explaining Thomas’s later actions.

His lawyers pointed to the effects of prolonged imprisonment and the difficulties of adjusting to life after release.

Those difficulties are real concerns for people leaving prison after many years.

But we cannot simply assume that his wrongful imprisonment caused him to kill Akeem Edwards.

An explanation requires evidence.

And even a credible explanation would not erase responsibility for the killing.

We can acknowledge the damage done by an unsafe conviction while also recognising the harm a person subsequently causes.

Both things can be true.

7. The Unfair Burden of Being the Perfect Exoneree

There’s another problem here.

When somebody is released after a wrongful conviction, we often expect a particular sort of story.

The person emerges from prison.

They embrace their family.

They express gratitude to their lawyers.

They begin rebuilding their life.

Perhaps they become an advocate for criminal justice reform.

It’s a story that audiences understand.

And when it happens, it’s genuinely encouraging.

But what happens when the person doesn’t fit that narrative?

What if they are angry?

What if they struggle with relationships?

What if they find ordinary life difficult?

What if they make poor decisions?

We shouldn’t confuse the moral appeal of an exoneration story with the legal basis for overturning a conviction.

A person doesn’t have to become an inspirational public speaker to deserve freedom from an unsafe conviction.

They don’t have to be likeable.

They don’t have to be articulate.

They don’t even have to be somebody we’d particularly want to spend time with.

They have to be entitled, under the law and the evidence, to the remedy they seek.

That is a much less romantic standard.

But it’s a much more important one.

8. Meanwhile, I’m Still Waiting for an Email

My own dealings with the justice system are obviously very different from the cases I’ve been discussing.

I’m not comparing an administrative enquiry about historical court records with spending decades in prison for murder.

The stakes are not remotely the same.

But these experiences have made me think more carefully about how difficult it can be to challenge or even understand what a legal system has done.

Sometimes the first obstacle isn’t persuading somebody that a decision was wrong.

It’s finding the records.

Establishing which court dealt with the matter.

Identifying the relevant proceedings.

Working out who has the authority to provide an answer.

And then waiting for that answer to arrive.

If navigating a relatively limited enquiry can become complicated, I can only imagine the persistence required to challenge a serious conviction after years in prison.

Of course, imagination is not evidence.

But it is a reason to take the problem seriously.

For somebody who maintains their innocence, delay is not merely an administrative inconvenience.

It can mean another birthday in prison.

Another Christmas.

Another year in which their family grows older while they remain behind bars.

And if their conviction is eventually overturned, no compensation can give them those years back.

They may not want to become a public symbol.

They may not want to campaign for the rest of their lives.

They may simply want to go home.

9. When Exoneration Backfires

So does the Shaurn Thomas case mean exoneration has backfired?

Not in the sense that his later crime makes the earlier conviction valid.

It doesn’t.

And not in the sense that we have established a measurable negative effect on other prisoners seeking to overturn their convictions.

We haven’t.

But it does present a risk.

When one person’s story becomes highly visible, it can start to stand in for a much larger group of people who have nothing to do with that person’s actions.

One former prisoner’s later crime can become a convenient argument against trusting anybody who claims to have been wrongfully convicted.

And that’s a mistake.

The legal system should be capable of correcting an unsafe conviction without demanding a guarantee about the person’s future behaviour.

It should also be capable of holding that same person accountable if they later commit another crime.

Those responsibilities are not contradictory.

They are both part of administering justice.

Akeem Edwards deserved justice for his murder.

Domingo Martinez deserved a reliable investigation into his.

And people still imprisoned under convictions that may be unsafe deserve a fair opportunity to have their cases examined.

None of those obligations cancels out the others.

Conclusion: Innocence Is Not a Group Membership

I started today waiting for a reply from the Single Justice Service.

I ended up thinking about a murder case in Philadelphia, the British appeals system and people who may still be sitting in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

That’s quite a journey for an afternoon spent scrolling through YouTube.

But perhaps it comes down to one simple principle.

Every conviction should be judged on its own evidence.

We shouldn’t preserve an unsafe conviction because somebody else, somewhere else, committed a crime after being released.

We shouldn’t ignore a murder because the person responsible was previously wrongfully convicted.

And we shouldn’t require people seeking exoneration to carry the burden of proving that every other exoneree will behave well for the rest of their lives.

Shaurn Thomas is responsible for his own actions.

Other prisoners are not responsible for his.

And the people who genuinely have been wrongfully convicted shouldn’t have to wait for the world to find a perfect exoneree before taking their claims seriously.

An exoneration is not a promise about the future. It is an obligation to confront the past.

15 October 2026

On Monday, I spent approximately four hours trying to establish the details of historical MS90 convictions recorded against me.

I telephoned one department, waited on hold, explained the situation, was directed elsewhere, waited on hold again, explained the situation again, and repeated the process until I began to wonder whether I was participating in an elaborate government-funded endurance experiment.

Eventually, an enforcement team was able to locate historical information and provide two account references.

Progress, at last.

Armed with those references, I contacted the Single Justice Service (SJS), hoping to establish which courts dealt with the cases, when the proceedings took place and how I could obtain the relevant records.

Today, I received a reply.

It began politely enough.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for your email.

Then came the questions.

The Six Questions

The SJS asked me to provide a URN, case number or account number so that they could locate the case.

Fair enough. I now have enforcement account references, although I cannot yet say whether those references are sufficient for the SJS to retrieve the underlying proceedings.

Then, to pass security, they requested my full name and six further details:

1. Date of birth.
2. First line of address.
3. Postcode.
4. The organisation prosecuting me.
5. The type of offence.
6. The date of the offence.

Some of those questions are perfectly reasonable.

Court records contain sensitive personal information. The service needs to establish that it is dealing with the right person before disclosing anything.

I have no objection to security checks.

My concern is with the assumptions built into the questions.

What if the information they’re asking me to provide is the very information I’m contacting them to discover?

Please Identify the Organisation You Cannot Identify

Take question four.

The organisation prosecuting you.

In my case, that might have been South Yorkshire Police. West Yorkshire Police is another possibility, given the geographical connections associated with the vehicle’s history.

But I don’t know.

And I don’t want to turn a suspicion into a fact merely because a government department has asked me to fill in a blank.

Likewise, I know that the convictions are recorded as MS90, but that is an endorsement code. It doesn’t, by itself, give me the original charge particulars, the prosecuting authority or the precise offence dates.

Those are things I am trying to establish.

So here I am, asking the justice system to identify a case, while the justice system asks me to identify the case before it can assist.

There is a certain elegance to the circularity.

Unfortunately, it’s the sort of elegance that makes you want to put your head through a desk.

The Human Search Engine

Something else bothered me about Monday’s telephone marathon.

I contacted several government departments. Only a minority of the people I reached seemed able to access information that moved my enquiry forward.

That isn’t necessarily a criticism of those individuals.

One department may have access to a particular database while another does not. Staff may be restricted by security rules, departmental responsibilities or the age of the records.

A perfectly capable employee cannot retrieve information from a system they aren’t permitted to access.

But from the perspective of the person seeking help, the experience is bewildering.

Every time I explained the situation, I had to reconstruct the story from the beginning.

Historical conviction. MS90 endorsement. Unknown original proceedings. Multiple previous addresses. Missing case references. Uncertainty about which police force was involved.

That’s not a simple enquiry.

It’s a small investigation.

And I was effectively asking each call handler to perform it while also navigating whatever software, procedures and institutional boundaries their department happened to operate under.

At what point does a public-service call handler become an unpaid systems integrator?

Or, more accurately, an under-supported one?

Complexity Has a Labour Cost

This is where the problem becomes bigger than my driving record.

We often discuss public-sector inefficiency as though the solution is simply to demand more from public-sector employees.

Answer calls faster.

Clear backlogs.

Reduce waiting times.

Process more enquiries.

But what happens when the underlying system becomes so complicated that even understanding a caller’s problem requires substantial institutional knowledge?

The person answering the phone may need to understand the distinction between a court case number and an enforcement account number, between a police force and a prosecuting authority, between an endorsement code and an offence, and between different court procedures.

They may also need to know which department owns which record, what can be disclosed, what cannot be disclosed, and which process applies when the caller doesn’t know the information normally used to identify a case.

That’s a considerable cognitive workload.

And much of it appears to arise not from the complexity of the law itself, but from the complexity of the systems surrounding it.

I find myself wondering how the public sector recruits, trains and retains people capable of navigating these increasingly elaborate arrangements.

Because people with strong analytical skills, technical confidence and the ability to untangle complicated processes are valuable well beyond the justice system.

In a labour market where private employers may offer better pay or working conditions, public institutions cannot simply assume that such expertise will always be available.

I don’t have the staffing or salary data to claim that this explains the difficulties I encountered.

But the question is worth asking.

If a service becomes more complicated every year, what happens when the people required to understand it are not given the resources, training or incentives to keep up?

An Email Pretending to Be a Form

There’s another curious feature of the SJS response.

It’s effectively a form, delivered by email.

Six numbered questions, plus a request for a reference number and a description of the enquiry.

Yet email doesn’t distinguish between information that is known, information that is uncertain and information that is unavailable.

It doesn’t provide an obvious option for “I don’t know the prosecuting authority.”

It doesn’t explain whether the offence date is required to pass security or merely useful for locating the record.

And it doesn’t clearly distinguish between an account number held by an enforcement team and the court’s original case reference.

A properly designed online enquiry service could do all of those things.

It could ask:

What are you trying to find?

Then:

What information do you already have?

It could accept a known case reference, an enforcement account number, an approximate date, previous addresses or a suspected prosecuting authority.

Crucially, it could allow the user to select:

Unknown.

That isn’t a failure to complete the form.

It is useful information about the nature of the enquiry.

The service could generate a ticket number, route the request to the appropriate team and provide a record of what had been requested.

Email could remain available for follow-up and for people unable or unwilling to use a web form.

None of this would magically join incompatible court databases or restore records that no longer exist.

Nor should a public website expose criminal case details without appropriate identity checks.

But better enquiry design could make uncertainty easier to communicate and reduce the need for people to repeat the same complicated explanation to multiple departments.

The Difference Between Automation and Digitisation

There’s a delightful irony here.

I’ve been writing about automated injustice: the danger of systems that replicate errors, apply rigid rules and make it difficult for human beings to challenge incorrect records.

Now I’m suggesting that the justice system needs more digital infrastructure.

But those ideas aren’t contradictory.

Automating a decision about someone’s legal rights is very different from automating the administration of a request for information.

I don’t want a computer deciding whether I committed an offence merely because a database contains an endorsement code.

I would, however, quite like a computer to tell me which department holds the original court record.

One kind of automation risks removing human judgment where it is essential.

The other could free human beings from repetitive administrative work so that they can exercise judgment where it actually matters.

Good digitisation should make the system more intelligible, not merely faster at repeating its existing mistakes.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Person Answering the Email

I want to be fair to the SJS.

Their response was courteous. They asked for identifying information. They explained that they needed to pass security before providing case-specific details.

They haven’t yet refused to help me.

And I haven’t established that their staff are unable to find the cases using the enforcement references I obtained.

Those are important distinctions.

My criticism is not that someone sent me six questions.

It’s that, after hours of telephone calls, the next step in tracing a historical court record still appears to depend on my ability to reconstruct details that may exist only within the very institutions I’m asking for help.

That suggests a system whose complexity is being transferred to the public and to the staff working at its edges.

Perhaps the next reply will locate everything.

Perhaps the account numbers will unlock the records immediately, and I’ll discover that I’ve been unnecessarily pessimistic.

I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

But even if my particular enquiry is resolved tomorrow, the design question remains.

Should finding out what happened in a court case require the investigative skills of a detective, the patience of a saint and the persistence of a software engineer debugging somebody else’s undocumented legacy system?

Because if the answer is yes, perhaps the problem isn’t that the public doesn’t understand the justice system.

Perhaps the justice system has become unnecessarily difficult to understand.

And perhaps, before we automate any more justice, we ought to make sure people can actually find it.

Monday, 12 October 2026 — A belated entry

William Shakespeare died more than four hundred years ago.

He never had to telephone His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. He never listened to a recorded voice asking him to select an option from a menu. And, so far as I know, nobody ever subjected him to sixty consecutive minutes of hold music.

Yet by the end of Monday, I was beginning to suspect that Shakespeare understood my predicament rather well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Act I: To Press One, or Not to Press One

My Monday began with what seemed a relatively straightforward objective.I needed to locate the court records behind an old MS90 conviction — an offence involving failure to provide information about the identity of a driver.I dispute that I was responsible for the alleged offence. The conviction appears to have contributed to the revocation of my full driving licence, and I had only recently become aware of the proceedings.

The circumstances surrounding that period of my life were complicated. COVID had disrupted almost everything, and I’d changed addresses several times. I cannot yet say precisely what happened to the original notices, or why the conviction came to be associated with me.That’s what I’m trying to establish.

Surely, I thought, the court would have a record.I telephoned HMCTS.Immediately, I encountered my first obstacle.

The automated telephone service wanted to know whether my enquiry concerned the Single Justice Procedure.Now, many relatively minor motoring offences are dealt with under that procedure. But I didn’t know whether mine had been.

And that was rather the point of calling.

Unfortunately, the automated system offered no option for “I don’t know; could somebody please tell me?”

It offered Yes or No.

To press one, or not to press one?

I spent approximately half an hour waiting to reach the relevant departments. In the end, neither could provide the historical MS90 case information I needed.

The first act concluded without a case number, a court record or even a clear idea of who might possess either.

Act II: A Welsh Voice and a Circular Journey

By about 10am, I decided to try DVLA.If the conviction had resulted in penalty points and the loss of my driving licence, perhaps the agency responsible for maintaining driving records could identify the original endorsement.

Unfortunately, the person I spoke to couldn’t locate the historical information I needed.

There was, at least, the consolation of a pleasant Welsh accent.

The adviser suggested contacting the penalty office and gave me a telephone number.

Excellent, I thought. A new lead.

I dialled it.

And found myself listening to the very same automated service with which I had begun my morning.

I had completed an entire administrative circuit and arrived back at the entrance.

Had Shakespeare written this scene, I suspect the audience would have laughed.

I was less amused.

But the adviser had inadvertently given me something useful: the name of another department.So I searched online and found various contact numbers for penalty offices, many apparently concerned with collecting payments rather than investigating old cases.

Eventually, I found a number for a North East England penalties office, based in Lincoln.

Onward to Act III.Act III: The Hour of Waiting

The next telephone call involved approximately another hour on hold.

There is something peculiarly exhausting about waiting on a telephone.

You cannot quite concentrate on anything else, because at any moment the music might stop and a human being might answer.

You must remain alert enough to explain a complicated situation immediately, yet passive enough to endure the same short piece of music repeating indefinitely.

It is neither proper rest nor productive work.

It is a kind of administrative purgatory.

When I finally reached someone, they were helpful. Unfortunately, the office no longer held the historical penalty information I needed.

They could identify a more recent matter, but not the old MS90 case.

Another dead end, or so it seemed.Then came the most useful suggestion of the morning.

Because I had recently become aware of the historical matter through enforcement agents — commonly known as bailiffs — I should try contacting the court enforcement team.

This was a department I hadn’t thought to approach.

After all, I was trying to investigate the origins of a conviction, not pay an outstanding penalty.

But perhaps the people responsible for enforcing a decision would retain information that the people answering general court enquiries could no longer find.It was worth one more call.

Act IV: Enter the Enforcement Team

By this point, it was approaching midday.

I telephoned the enforcement team.Another hour on hold.Another hour of listening for the tiny interruption that might signal the arrival of an actual person.

And then, finally, something happened.The adviser could see information relating to my historical MS90 matter on their system.

For the first time that day, I was speaking to someone who could read back details connected to the very case I had spent the morning trying to trace.

I still didn’t have the complete court file, and the information did not resolve the question of whether the conviction was correctly attributed to me.

But it established a tangible trail.

There was information in an official system. There were references I could use. The matter was no longer just an old endorsement I was trying to explain.The adviser supplied two enforcement account numbers, each consisting of eight digits followed by a letter.

As I understood the explanation, the numbers related to different periods of records, one before 2022 and one afterwards.These were not necessarily the original court case numbers or Unique Reference Numbers. But they were identifiers that another department might be able to use to locate the underlying matters.

That was progress.The next step would be to take those references back to the Single Justice Procedure service and ask it to identify the proceedings associated with them.

For any conviction of which I genuinely had no knowledge, I also need to establish the appropriate procedure for making a statutory declaration, including whether any application would now be considered late.

Each case must be identified separately. A single account reference may not tell the whole story.

Still, after several hours, I finally had something more useful than another telephone number.

I had a lead.

And the strangest part was where it had come from.

The enforcement team — the very part of the system concerned with collecting the consequences of a decision — had been the first to help me trace its origins.

There is an irony there that even Shakespeare might have appreciated.

I had spent the morning looking for the beginning of a legal process.It was the people dealing with its ending who could point me backwards.

Act V: The Law’s Delay

By nearly 2pm, I was mentally exhausted.

On paper, I had spent only a few hours making telephone calls.

In practice, those hours had involved repeated explanations, uncertain departmental boundaries, long periods of forced attention and the constant possibility that each call would lead nowhere.

I had begun with a simple question: where are the records relating to this conviction?Several hours later, I had two account references and a possible route to obtaining them.

That might sound like modest progress.To me, it felt like winning a small battle.

I couldn’t face another call that afternoon.Later that evening, I watched a documentary about Shakespeare and the many actors and directors who have interpreted his plays over the twentieth century.

There was discussion of Macbeth, among other works, and it reminded me of a line I’d encountered in Hamlet.In the famous “To be, or not to be” speech, Hamlet lists some of the burdens people endure:

“The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office…”

The law’s delay.

There it was.

Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare was already describing the frustration of waiting for legal processes to deliver something resembling resolution.

Of course, he wasn’t talking about call centres or automated menus.

But the underlying experience seems surprisingly familiar.

The difficulty of obtaining answers. The distance between an individual and an institution. The feeling that the machinery of justice moves according to a timetable entirely unrelated to the urgency of the person caught inside it.

I had been thinking about the legal system as an engineer.On Monday, I found myself thinking about it as a playwright might.

A succession of characters entered the scene. Each knew something, but nobody appeared to know the whole story. Each directed me towards another character. The audience — in this case, me — waited for the plot to advance.

The difficulty was that I wasn’t watching a play.I was trying to find out why my driving licence had been revoked.An Unexpected Lesson

If anyone reading this is trying to trace an old magistrates’ court matter, particularly one that has reached the stage of enforcement, Monday taught me something worth sharing.

The court enforcement team may be able to identify historical matters that are difficult to locate through general enquiries.

That won’t necessarily be true in every case, and enforcement account numbers aren’t substitutes for the original court records.

But if a matter has been referred for enforcement, it’s worth asking whether the enforcement team can provide references, identify the originating court and explain how to trace the underlying proceedings.

In my case, it was the first genuinely productive route I found.I still have questions about the MS90 conviction, the notices that may have been issued, the addresses used and the consequences for my driving licence.

I don’t yet know whether the explanation is an administrative mistake, an incorrectly attributed allegation, a failure of communication or something else.I intend to find out.

And I intend to document the process, because somebody else may one day find themselves in the same position, facing the same telephone menus and wondering where to begin.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of Monday wasn’t that nobody wanted to help.

The people I eventually spoke to generally did try to help.

It was that the information appeared to be divided between systems, with no obvious route for an ordinary person to discover which one held the answer.

A system can contain the information you need and still make that information extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

Shakespeare understood the law’s delay.

I wonder what he would have made of the hold music.

To be continued.