Three Labour members jailed for vote-rigging

A case of postal and proxy vote fraud to support Labour has finally resulted in convictions:

A former city mayor has been jailed for nine months after being convicted of vote-rigging.
Labour’s Mohammed Choudhary, 49, former mayor of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, was jailed at King’s Lynn Crown Court.

Party candidate Maqbool Hussein, 52, was jailed for three months and Tariq Mahmood, 40, received a 15-month term.

All three from Peterborough, were convicted of forgery over a scheme to fabricate votes for the Peterborough city council election in June 2004. [BBC]

One question: is there something wrong with a system that takes four years for a relatively small case such as this to be resolved?