A very soggy Rishi Sunak announced today, to the surprise of most of us, that Britain will next go to the polls on the 4th of July. This move will spark scores of lines of political commentary in papers and see talking heads obsess over it in the coming days, and rightly so, anyone even remotely interested in politics is going to have a very exciting next six weeks.

All this focus an attention will come as an, albeit extremely modest, relief to a certain former businesswoman. Paula Vennells’ evidence sessions have been highly anticipated, it will be the first time in over 10 years that she will speak about the Horizon system and the terrible scandal that it spawned. The date has been in the diary for months, and with the huge public awareness of the inquiry thanks to the ITV drama, it was bound to dominate front pages over the next few days. But alas, this is being written on Wednesday evening, one has to scroll past the huge election banners before finding mention of the Post Office. Rishi even managed to produce such an unusual image for the cameras in his rain soaked suit that one can’t imagine many editors will chose anything else for their leading image. For Vennells, the timing has been very convenient.

However, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. The Bear is absolutely appalled by the conduct of the executives at the Post Office during the years that this terrible miscarriage of justice took place, and so this should in no way be seen as an attempt to defend Mrs Vennells, but the “trial by media” that often comes with cases such as these has the potential to cause great damage.

In this country we have a justice system, and that system seeks to deal out the punishments that a criminal deserves. That system exists to ensure fairness and equality before the law, and whilst the system fails - see the Post Office scandal itself - the way to fix it is not to bring power into one’s own hands, it is to seek to fix the system.

The court of public opinion is one that has it’s foundation in emotion, not facts. One of the most haunting examples being Richard Jewell, the security guard who discovered the bomb at the 1996 Olympics who then had his life torn apart by the media despite being totally innocent.

And what is more, even when the media and the public have cottoned on to the correct person, society tends to give them added punishment above and beyond that which they receive by the state for their crime. A former criminal in this country will have a shadow cast over their lives well beyond the time they finish serving their appointed punishment. I think a question we should be asking ourselves as a society is if we truly think certain criminals deserve all this hatred and abuse through the media, should we not seek to change the punishments we give out. Or perhaps a more difficult question to put to oneself is whether we allow ourselves to go too far because of emotion. Because the justice system has burdens, burdens of proof that it has to overcome that protect all of us from being wrongfully punished, or just as importantly punished disproportionately.

Paula Vennells will have to answer for her crimes. She will have to answer the fierce questioning of Jason Beer KC in this inquiry, and The Bear would be wholly unsurprised if it came to be that Mrs Vennells had to answer questioning in a criminal context in the future. But that is the proper place for punishment. And we, as a civil society should respect that. For if at the end of this believe she has not received her fair hand, that she has gotten off lightly, it is our duty to seek change in the system. For the risk of taking justice into our own hands has a great risk, of hurting those who have done nothing wrong, and destroying others far beyond their crimes.

Maybe the attention of an often malicious media being tempered just slightly will allow us to leave the justice system to throw the first stone.