Does anyone know how the courts rendered these verdicts?
Courts are supposed to be a level of protection.
If they can't show motivation, point to actual dates and quantities of money stolen, a bank account or purchase it showed up in, all the usual standards of evidence to make an actual criminal case...
...how does this progress from an accusation to beyond reasonable doubt?
Software is buggy. Since when does a court accept the uncorroborated report of software, without any other corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
This boggles my mind, and seems to go against fundamental legal principles.
Is this going to result in some sort of legal reform? The root cause here isn't a software bug, it's a legal system bug.
In one case (Seema Misra) the judge asked the jury this in his/her summing up:
“There is no direct evidence of her taking any money... She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched...Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?”
This is a good example of why a jury trial is not always the best choice for a defendant. Juries are often overly impressed by authority figures, and assess the status of witnesses rather than the evidence itself.
It's a "guilty until proven innocent" story, and I'm afraid there'll be many more in the future when the black-box software so prints out and whomever is in charge refuses to question the legitimacy of the claims for whatever reason they may have. This one time they made it out, countless more may not.
If a jury concluded that the defendant is guilty, I don't think judicial process reform would help. The fix would require at least public education. Reforming judicial process is hard, but fixing public perception seems way harder.
Never underestimate the lack of technical knowledge of judge, jury, Senate or Congress (I'm American, I can't speak to the British system - but it seems similar).
The answer to this question is that senior executives within the Post Office knew that Horizon had faults and deliberately withheld the information when prosecuting the sub-postmasters.
This is a fundamental breach of the prosecutor's duty to disclose any evidence that undermines the prosecution case or supports the defence case. This duty continues to exist after conviction so timing of knowledge is irrelevant.
The judgment is telling in that there are records in which Post Office officials made statements that minutes of meetings about faults in the Horizon system should not be taken so as to avoid having to disclose them in proceedings.
It is corporate failure on an unimaginable scale and three convicted individuals have died before having their convictions quashed.
Yesterday's judgment is long but very readable. I would anticipate further fallout and understand there may be a live police investigation on the basis that several individuals may have perverted the course of justice by either proceeding with prosecutions or omitting material evidence from testimony.
The OP asked, "doesn't there need to be evidence beyond just 'a computer said so'?".
You said the answer is that "the computer said so" and then the operator of the computer said "I agree with the computer".
In my mind, the question still remains. Isn't there any requirement to show where the money went, what account it went into, give dates and details about how they stole the money, etc?
Of course, hiding the known bugs in the software is a scandal and worth talking about, but it doesn't answer the original question I think.
A big part of the problem is that the post office is not accountable as it's a government organization. A private company would be bankrupted by this, but the post office will just be bailed out by taxpayers.
I don't know the full details of how the judges operated during the prosecutions, but one of the bizarre details is that the post office has the oldest prosecution and investigation team in the world, predating the police force, dating back to highwaymen robbing postal services on horseback. In other words, the post office executives seem to have made a policy decision around these financial discrepancies, the post office managers gathered evidence on their behalf under the guise of helping their employees, and the post office prosecution team prosecuted them in court. Very little unbiased external opinion was brought in. Even the police seemed to have decided early on that they didn't have jurisdiction in the post office for the above reasons. Its an extremely bizarre detail that, as a UK resident, I had no idea about until these recent revelations.
> Software is buggy. Since when does a court accept the uncorroborated report of software, without any other corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
Former PwC Auditor here , the court accepts evidence from independent IT Auditing company who are qualified to perform an audit on the system and asses the reliability of the system or from the vendor himself who provide proofs that the system he sells is reliable ( testing , certifications etc..)
If you're developer you'll probably agree with me that this approach is of course a "non-sense" because no software was ever created "bug-free" or can be really defined as "reliable".
Yet , that's how the court works : "The vendor says the software has no bugs , thus the court is rejecting the objection of buggy software. The court found you guilty"
I'm sadden by this news because it depicts how much the mixture of "bad software" and "corporate/enterprise software" are tied together and how much it can impact people on their daily life with irreversible impact.
> or from the vendor himself who provide proofs that the system he sells is reliable
It seems that this was the conflict of interest that made Fujitsu's testimony unreliable. They couldn't admit fault without risking the contract. And I'm not sure that relationship was addressed in court for a jury to note.
The poor woman suffered the loss of her two sons, had to go through a Kafka-esque ordeal of trying to prove her innocence, only to spend three years in prison, all the time being reviled by the press, prison officers and prisoners for being a child-killer. Her second appeal seems to only have been successful because the family discovered that the prosecution had actually withheld exculpatory evidence showing that the second death was actually due to a bacterial infection (the first appeal acknowledged the statistical evidence was flawed but still upheld the conviction). She effectively received a death sentence as she died four years later from psychological issues that were a direct result of her ordeal.
If such a tragic miscarriage of justice could happen to a reasonably well-off, professional working woman (solicitor), it could happen to anyone!
There's possibly something on Bailii. (A small volunteer run project, but the website is tricky to use.) Searching for [post office horizon] reveals a few cases.
Everyone except the victims is to blame here. The courts should have done better, but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a public defender and unable to afford their own defence either. So many would have plead guilty and others had to try and manage the defence themselves. The result is predictable.
A wider question is why no one asked why so many people with the same job were being charged and convicted/pleading guilty. Fraud is a rare crime and rarely prosecuted. So many Cases in one profession is fishy all by itself.
> A wider question is why no one asked why so many people with the same job were being charged and convicted/pleading guilty
Indeed. You would hope at some point someone would ask why so many have "stolen" money, but yet the actual money has never been located in any account, almost as if the money just disappeared, or never existed in the first place. Hmmm.
Particularly given that, on the theory that the software was correct, the post office was able to reliably detect the kind of fraud they claim was going on and make the supposed fraudsters pay the money back.
>"but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a public defender and unable to afford their own defence either"
So maybe the UK should spend less time writing horror stories about other "undemocratic" countries and concentrate on their own sorry state of human rights.
What had happen should be impossible in a "democratic western country that respects human rights". Last time I checked they count themselves as one.
From what has been reported in the media, the Post Office and the contractor knew that the software had issues but chose to cover it up and to go after innocent individuals instead. In some instances people were also made to sign settlements preventing them from criticising the software.
This is why this is such a big scandal in the UK. The software was buggy but people lied and sent innocent people to jail to cover it up.
The law presumes that computer systems operate correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary.
This is a reasonably common thing - for example the law also assumes letters are delivered after being posted unless there is evidence to the contrary.
If the computer says money amounts don't match, that still doesn't say who stole it.
It could have been the person directly responsible for it -- or it could have been a third party attempting to steal from them, or someone hacking the system, etc.
You still need to go beyond reasonable doubt -- establish motive, establish corroborating evidence, etc.
To riff off that, it’s also a very common (not universal, nobody is saying that) thing to presume that the justice system works correctly, at least in some countries. But this is aspirational at best.
We need better frameworks for incorporating doubt into our thinking about such things... whether it’s the reliability of computers, or of the justice system, producing what we expect.
>"This is a reasonably common thing - for example the law also assumes letters are delivered after being posted unless there is evidence to the contrary."
They did not invent registered mail for nothing. It is exactly for the reason that mail does not get delivered. I am sick of counting how many times I've received somebody else's mail. And I got $8,000 worth of integrated circuits from Digikey marked as delivered but missing. By sheer accident found that it's been delivered to the house of one of my neighbors.
I even once chased the postman and asked him why are you dropping somebody else's mail in my box? All I could get from him was: "it is ok"
There is a paper here [1] based a lot on these cases calling for a review of the presumption that computer evidence is correct.
It is an absolutely crazy situation where the onus is on the person disputing the computer evidence to show that something is wrong.
Even in the middle ages they had a system in place where both parties would have reliable evidence to deal with non reputation in financial transactions. They used a split wooden tally sticks [2], yet now because it is on a computer, and computers are supposedly rarely wrong the courts will allow an organisation to produce something from essentially their own 1 sided ledger and it is up to the other side to prove it wrong.
The sub postmasters had no evidence, no ledgers or paper receipts of their own, they were expected to rely entirely on this system to be correct, when it wasn't the entire justice system was rigged against them with the only possibility of winning was to prove that a multi million £ IT system was not working correctly. This would have been hard enough anyway, but the company who built it and the one using it were both willing to lie to cover up its failings.
People believe machines because they don't lie. There is a cognitive dissonance between knowing that software is written by humans who make lots of errors and the believe that machines don't make errors.
Courts are led by humans. Judges (and juries) and in particular old judges (and older juries) often don't have a good grasp on technology and injustice like this happens. Luckily there is the appeal process in most modern countries so that such misdeeds can be corrected. Unfortunately a lot of people were hurt by this. Hopefully some good education of justice officials can come out of this.
This occurs for other things across a variety of spheres, but defence barristers are more or less experienced in some of those spheres, and lay people have more or less knowledge in some spheres.
If a police officer tells the jury that they are 100% sure the person they saw with the knife was the defendant, the defence understands how and to what extent they might be able to persuade the jury that the officer is mistaken about this, or how else to undermine this testimony, and they won't accept it if the officer seems to suggest that, since they're sure this was the person with the knife therefore that person stabbed the victim. There are lots of reasons why, even if the jury is convinced their client is lying and had a knife, that doesn't necessarily mean they stabbed the victim.
In contrast when an "IT expert" tells the jury that 100% the only way this database entry would appear is if the defendant stole money, the defence legal team may be unsure how to persuade a jury (since they aren't IT experts) that this might not be so, and they may end up allowing this to go unchallenged even though I would know to ask lots of questions about access, logging, test strategies, and so on.
Or if a medical doctor tells the jury that the only way this baby gets so many broken bones is that her parents were deliberately shaking her because she was crying, and so they're guilty of murder, the lawyer isn't a medic, and neither is the jury. So who is there to tell them that er, actually there can be other causes and the prosecution needs something else?
Light Blue Touchpaper covered some cases where it seems likely what happened is that crap implementations of EMV ("Chip and PIN") were defrauded by crooks who understood where the flaws were and how to exploit them, but the banks went after their customers, telling juries that the machine is infallible and if it says they used a PIN, that must be true, even though the researchers show various ways it might not in fact be true. Further, bank employees will cheerfully tell a jury that there's no way for other employees to discover a customer PIN, even though meanwhile the bank is firing employees it knows did just that. We ultimately cannot entirely insulate the justice system against people who lie under oath. We can only punish them when they get caught.
So, to the extent anything should be done here, you'd want to start with say, not rewarding the people at Post Office Ltd and in the Horizon team who lied about this and tried so hard to prevent justice being done. Two guesses whether the present government chose to do that...
> the defence legal team may be unsure how to persuade a jury (since they aren't IT experts) that this might not be so
Then they're a crap defense.
They find an expert witness -- an IT witness in this case -- for their side to explain how the software might make errors, how no software is perfect, etc. Having opposing expert witnesses, one for prosecution and one for defense, is standard.
Lawyers don't need to be domain experts in every, or even most, cases they take on. They do need to find experts though.
The Post Office knew Horizon had faults and had a legal duty to disclose its knowledge to the defendants when prosecuting them. They failed to do so.
Paragraphs 81-90 are frankly unbelievable and I question what Post Office's own lawyers were doing.
Paragraph 91(iii):
A memorandum dated 22 October 2010 by a senior lawyer in POL’s Criminal Law Division reported the successful prosecution of Seema Misra. The memorandum complained that the case had involved “an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system” which, the author said, the prosecution team had been able to “destroy”. He ended the memorandum, which was copied to the Press Office, by expressing the hope that “the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon”.
The prosecution team had "destroyed" it because they had withheld crucial evidence supporting the allegations against the Horizon system.
The Seema Misra case is what started the unravelling because her husband called a journalist, Nick Wallis [1], who has spent 10 years investigating and reporting on this case.
It's a scandal of immense proportions and three convicted individuals died before seeing their convictions quashed. It is very sad.
I find it hard to believe that the approach taken - to prosecute sub post masters in this way - didn't make it to board level (indeed if it didn't then that by itself would be a corporate failure).
Individual managers may have had incentives that would lead to take this approach but the PO Board should have had an overview and have been able to correct this.
In any event a great scandal and very sad as you say.
Back in the 80s on the Usenet, there used to be a popular forum & newsletter called comp.risks on the potential risks of computer technology failures in the society, such as software bugs. Incidents like this one were exactly the situation imagined by the forum members.
It still exists! It's now mainly a mailing list, which I'm still subscribed to and still receiving. Unfortunately right this second the website seems to be down, but it's: http://www.risks.org
People getting forcibly removed from overbooked flights was another. When policies rely solely on computer automation, and human employees aren't allowed to make common sense ad hoc decisions, you end up with some ridiculous injustices (however petty).
The craziest thing to me here is that they never actually found any of the accused to be in possession of the funds they had supposedly embezzled. I wonder if there's someone sitting on a beach somewhere with their favorite stapler and all of those fractions of pennies piled up on an offshore account...
Yes, someone from Fujitsu who didn't deliver quality software, refused to accept it _might_ be buggy.
>In the same speech, he said that the Post Office would work with the government to compensate the employees who were affected by Horizon’s inaccuracies.
Fujitsu won't even be held financially accountable for the suicide, but tax payers will. To me, it sounds like a great deal, delivery shitty software, bounce back any questions about quality, bugs, refuse to re-test software for given scenarios for years, but still get paid.
It's just another example of "socialise the losses".
IF people at Fujitsu knew that there were problems with the system and IF they still presented evidence that it was infallible, then people need to be going to prison.
If one were writing a novel, the thief would be hiding their tracks by being in a key place feeding the prosecution.
But really there is a track record of court systems latching onto criminal prosecutions via questionable technologies from handwriting analysis to lie detectors et al.
A lot of criticism of the courts here - much of which is probably reasonable.
I wonder though if one element is that post masters were of course prosecuted individually, and the evidence mounted against them may have looked convincing on an individual basis - with the courts not having the time or the resources to mount a full scale investigation into the validity of the claims made by the post office.
Only when looked at in aggregate did the position look absurd - 700 or so postmasters breaking the law in this way out of 12,000 or so post offices. I suspect that it's rare for courts to perform a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of an offence occurring.
The only people with an overview of the situation were post office management and they chose to cover it up.
This is a horrifying miscarriage of justice, and could not have happened if "free/libre" was in the software's specifications. We must demand software freedom! Users must be entitled to see, run, modify, and share software.
As I understand it, the issue is there was never a second record.
Imagine you run a post office, people pay you cash to post their letter/parcel instead of putting a stamp on it.
You are meant to enter into the till every time you do that. Every pound you get this way, you owe 50p to RM who will pickup and deliver whatever is in the bag at the end of the day.
You diligently and honestly enter every pound you get into the till. But the till is broken, every time someone buys a Mars bar, it adds one to the count of objects posted.
At the end of the month, royal mail think you posted 1000s of extra items. They demand 1000s of extra 50ps. You didn't and don't count every item, that's the tills job. But somehow your losing money. You don't know how, RM don't care they just demand payment. Sooner or later you cannot pay (or refuse as the number must be wrong).
Readit News
UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913037 - April 2021 (279 comments)
Some past threads:
UK Post Office: Error-laden software ruined staff lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 - April 2021 (3 comments)
UK legal system assumes that computers don't have bugs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24 comments)
Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 - Oct 2020 (2 comments)
Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being convicted of theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (103 comments)
Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters' computer claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 - June 2012 (1 comment)
p.s. I've changed URL above from https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s... to the BBC article it's based on.
Courts are supposed to be a level of protection.
If they can't show motivation, point to actual dates and quantities of money stolen, a bank account or purchase it showed up in, all the usual standards of evidence to make an actual criminal case...
...how does this progress from an accusation to beyond reasonable doubt?
Software is buggy. Since when does a court accept the uncorroborated report of software, without any other corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
This boggles my mind, and seems to go against fundamental legal principles.
Is this going to result in some sort of legal reform? The root cause here isn't a software bug, it's a legal system bug.
“There is no direct evidence of her taking any money... She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched...Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?”
The jury pronounced Seema Misra guilty.
There are many more details in this very comprehensive report by Private Eye: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...
Is that not the case in Britain?
This is a fundamental breach of the prosecutor's duty to disclose any evidence that undermines the prosecution case or supports the defence case. This duty continues to exist after conviction so timing of knowledge is irrelevant.
The judgment is telling in that there are records in which Post Office officials made statements that minutes of meetings about faults in the Horizon system should not be taken so as to avoid having to disclose them in proceedings.
It is corporate failure on an unimaginable scale and three convicted individuals have died before having their convictions quashed.
Yesterday's judgment is long but very readable. I would anticipate further fallout and understand there may be a live police investigation on the basis that several individuals may have perverted the course of justice by either proceeding with prosecutions or omitting material evidence from testimony.
The OP asked, "doesn't there need to be evidence beyond just 'a computer said so'?".
You said the answer is that "the computer said so" and then the operator of the computer said "I agree with the computer".
In my mind, the question still remains. Isn't there any requirement to show where the money went, what account it went into, give dates and details about how they stole the money, etc?
Of course, hiding the known bugs in the software is a scandal and worth talking about, but it doesn't answer the original question I think.
So this is basically saying "the system is only as just as the integrity of the persons involved with the case when factoring in perverse incentives"
Former PwC Auditor here , the court accepts evidence from independent IT Auditing company who are qualified to perform an audit on the system and asses the reliability of the system or from the vendor himself who provide proofs that the system he sells is reliable ( testing , certifications etc..)
If you're developer you'll probably agree with me that this approach is of course a "non-sense" because no software was ever created "bug-free" or can be really defined as "reliable".
Yet , that's how the court works : "The vendor says the software has no bugs , thus the court is rejecting the objection of buggy software. The court found you guilty"
I'm sadden by this news because it depicts how much the mixture of "bad software" and "corporate/enterprise software" are tied together and how much it can impact people on their daily life with irreversible impact.
It seems that this was the conflict of interest that made Fujitsu's testimony unreliable. They couldn't admit fault without risking the contract. And I'm not sure that relationship was addressed in court for a jury to note.
And, do you hate Lotus Notes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
I agree the issue is a legal system bug.
The poor woman suffered the loss of her two sons, had to go through a Kafka-esque ordeal of trying to prove her innocence, only to spend three years in prison, all the time being reviled by the press, prison officers and prisoners for being a child-killer. Her second appeal seems to only have been successful because the family discovered that the prosecution had actually withheld exculpatory evidence showing that the second death was actually due to a bacterial infection (the first appeal acknowledged the statistical evidence was flawed but still upheld the conviction). She effectively received a death sentence as she died four years later from psychological issues that were a direct result of her ordeal.
If such a tragic miscarriage of justice could happen to a reasonably well-off, professional working woman (solicitor), it could happen to anyone!
https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-of...
There's possibly something on Bailii. (A small volunteer run project, but the website is tricky to use.) Searching for [post office horizon] reveals a few cases.
Here's one useful transcript and discussion: https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/2217
A wider question is why no one asked why so many people with the same job were being charged and convicted/pleading guilty. Fraud is a rare crime and rarely prosecuted. So many Cases in one profession is fishy all by itself.
Indeed. You would hope at some point someone would ask why so many have "stolen" money, but yet the actual money has never been located in any account, almost as if the money just disappeared, or never existed in the first place. Hmmm.
Absolutely not the case. If one cannot afford a solicitor one will be appointed.
What makes you think that?
So maybe the UK should spend less time writing horror stories about other "undemocratic" countries and concentrate on their own sorry state of human rights.
What had happen should be impossible in a "democratic western country that respects human rights". Last time I checked they count themselves as one.
From what has been reported in the media, the Post Office and the contractor knew that the software had issues but chose to cover it up and to go after innocent individuals instead. In some instances people were also made to sign settlements preventing them from criticising the software.
This is why this is such a big scandal in the UK. The software was buggy but people lied and sent innocent people to jail to cover it up.
This is a reasonably common thing - for example the law also assumes letters are delivered after being posted unless there is evidence to the contrary.
If the computer says money amounts don't match, that still doesn't say who stole it.
It could have been the person directly responsible for it -- or it could have been a third party attempting to steal from them, or someone hacking the system, etc.
You still need to go beyond reasonable doubt -- establish motive, establish corroborating evidence, etc.
We need better frameworks for incorporating doubt into our thinking about such things... whether it’s the reliability of computers, or of the justice system, producing what we expect.
They did not invent registered mail for nothing. It is exactly for the reason that mail does not get delivered. I am sick of counting how many times I've received somebody else's mail. And I got $8,000 worth of integrated circuits from Digikey marked as delivered but missing. By sheer accident found that it's been delivered to the house of one of my neighbors.
I even once chased the postman and asked him why are you dropping somebody else's mail in my box? All I could get from him was: "it is ok"
It is an absolutely crazy situation where the onus is on the person disputing the computer evidence to show that something is wrong. Even in the middle ages they had a system in place where both parties would have reliable evidence to deal with non reputation in financial transactions. They used a split wooden tally sticks [2], yet now because it is on a computer, and computers are supposedly rarely wrong the courts will allow an organisation to produce something from essentially their own 1 sided ledger and it is up to the other side to prove it wrong. The sub postmasters had no evidence, no ledgers or paper receipts of their own, they were expected to rely entirely on this system to be correct, when it wasn't the entire justice system was rigged against them with the only possibility of winning was to prove that a multi million £ IT system was not working correctly. This would have been hard enough anyway, but the company who built it and the one using it were both willing to lie to cover up its failings.
[1]https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
I am wondering too if they maybe had "experts" testify , and those experts were just clueless.
> Since when does a court accept the uncorroborated report of software, without any other corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
Since before software has had bugs. Law is the human-governance form of software. It's just as shitty as software is, for the same exact reason.
If a police officer tells the jury that they are 100% sure the person they saw with the knife was the defendant, the defence understands how and to what extent they might be able to persuade the jury that the officer is mistaken about this, or how else to undermine this testimony, and they won't accept it if the officer seems to suggest that, since they're sure this was the person with the knife therefore that person stabbed the victim. There are lots of reasons why, even if the jury is convinced their client is lying and had a knife, that doesn't necessarily mean they stabbed the victim.
In contrast when an "IT expert" tells the jury that 100% the only way this database entry would appear is if the defendant stole money, the defence legal team may be unsure how to persuade a jury (since they aren't IT experts) that this might not be so, and they may end up allowing this to go unchallenged even though I would know to ask lots of questions about access, logging, test strategies, and so on.
Or if a medical doctor tells the jury that the only way this baby gets so many broken bones is that her parents were deliberately shaking her because she was crying, and so they're guilty of murder, the lawyer isn't a medic, and neither is the jury. So who is there to tell them that er, actually there can be other causes and the prosecution needs something else?
Light Blue Touchpaper covered some cases where it seems likely what happened is that crap implementations of EMV ("Chip and PIN") were defrauded by crooks who understood where the flaws were and how to exploit them, but the banks went after their customers, telling juries that the machine is infallible and if it says they used a PIN, that must be true, even though the researchers show various ways it might not in fact be true. Further, bank employees will cheerfully tell a jury that there's no way for other employees to discover a customer PIN, even though meanwhile the bank is firing employees it knows did just that. We ultimately cannot entirely insulate the justice system against people who lie under oath. We can only punish them when they get caught.
So, to the extent anything should be done here, you'd want to start with say, not rewarding the people at Post Office Ltd and in the Horizon team who lied about this and tried so hard to prevent justice being done. Two guesses whether the present government chose to do that...
Then they're a crap defense.
They find an expert witness -- an IT witness in this case -- for their side to explain how the software might make errors, how no software is perfect, etc. Having opposing expert witnesses, one for prosecution and one for defense, is standard.
Lawyers don't need to be domain experts in every, or even most, cases they take on. They do need to find experts though.
Dead Comment
Read the judgment: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hamilton...
The Post Office knew Horizon had faults and had a legal duty to disclose its knowledge to the defendants when prosecuting them. They failed to do so.
Paragraphs 81-90 are frankly unbelievable and I question what Post Office's own lawyers were doing.
Paragraph 91(iii):
A memorandum dated 22 October 2010 by a senior lawyer in POL’s Criminal Law Division reported the successful prosecution of Seema Misra. The memorandum complained that the case had involved “an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system” which, the author said, the prosecution team had been able to “destroy”. He ended the memorandum, which was copied to the Press Office, by expressing the hope that “the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon”.
The prosecution team had "destroyed" it because they had withheld crucial evidence supporting the allegations against the Horizon system.
The Seema Misra case is what started the unravelling because her husband called a journalist, Nick Wallis [1], who has spent 10 years investigating and reporting on this case.
It's a scandal of immense proportions and three convicted individuals died before seeing their convictions quashed. It is very sad.
[1] https://www.nickwallis.com
Individual managers may have had incentives that would lead to take this approach but the PO Board should have had an overview and have been able to correct this.
In any event a great scandal and very sad as you say.
>In the same speech, he said that the Post Office would work with the government to compensate the employees who were affected by Horizon’s inaccuracies.
Fujitsu won't even be held financially accountable for the suicide, but tax payers will. To me, it sounds like a great deal, delivery shitty software, bounce back any questions about quality, bugs, refuse to re-test software for given scenarios for years, but still get paid.
IF people at Fujitsu knew that there were problems with the system and IF they still presented evidence that it was infallible, then people need to be going to prison.
But really there is a track record of court systems latching onto criminal prosecutions via questionable technologies from handwriting analysis to lie detectors et al.
I wonder though if one element is that post masters were of course prosecuted individually, and the evidence mounted against them may have looked convincing on an individual basis - with the courts not having the time or the resources to mount a full scale investigation into the validity of the claims made by the post office.
Only when looked at in aggregate did the position look absurd - 700 or so postmasters breaking the law in this way out of 12,000 or so post offices. I suspect that it's rare for courts to perform a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of an offence occurring.
The only people with an overview of the situation were post office management and they chose to cover it up.
Could still happen. But would be less likely.
Imagine you run a post office, people pay you cash to post their letter/parcel instead of putting a stamp on it.
You are meant to enter into the till every time you do that. Every pound you get this way, you owe 50p to RM who will pickup and deliver whatever is in the bag at the end of the day.
You diligently and honestly enter every pound you get into the till. But the till is broken, every time someone buys a Mars bar, it adds one to the count of objects posted.
At the end of the month, royal mail think you posted 1000s of extra items. They demand 1000s of extra 50ps. You didn't and don't count every item, that's the tills job. But somehow your losing money. You don't know how, RM don't care they just demand payment. Sooner or later you cannot pay (or refuse as the number must be wrong).
Then the courts get involved...
in the deep-mind world we live in today that's a scary thing to do.
i am going to have to agree with the group that feel unhappy with the monetary outcome.