'Horizon IT system was 100% reliable'(bbc.co.uk)
bbc.co.uk
'Horizon IT system was 100% reliable'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-68103946
6 comments
This is a fairly loose thing to say. Firstly no the UK doesn't have a judicial system. There are separate legal systems in England & Wales, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland.
Amongst many other issues, The Post Office has a historic freedom to investigate, pursue and prosecute criminal cases on its own behalf- no need to persuade e.g. the police. This has been shown, for anyone with any doubt, to be a massive conflict of interest. Another repeated occurrence is the discovery that the Post Office claimed, but would not provide evidence and used this 'position' to bully people into accepting plea bargains. Essentially the Post Office dishonestly and deliberately abused its position in numerous cases to bypass the legal system in each of the home nations so that defendants would simply turn up in court to plead guilty and be sentenced. Had these cases been required to meet the standards of a conventional criminal investigation and trial in any of the UK home nations, many more of them would have failed to convict.
Amongst many other issues, The Post Office has a historic freedom to investigate, pursue and prosecute criminal cases on its own behalf- no need to persuade e.g. the police. This has been shown, for anyone with any doubt, to be a massive conflict of interest. Another repeated occurrence is the discovery that the Post Office claimed, but would not provide evidence and used this 'position' to bully people into accepting plea bargains. Essentially the Post Office dishonestly and deliberately abused its position in numerous cases to bypass the legal system in each of the home nations so that defendants would simply turn up in court to plead guilty and be sentenced. Had these cases been required to meet the standards of a conventional criminal investigation and trial in any of the UK home nations, many more of them would have failed to convict.
The post-office abuse existed in both the civil and criminal courts. Obviously the criminal side generally had more serious consequences, but I don't think you can chalk this up to the fact it wasn't carried out by the police, particularly in that private criminal prosecution exists in England and is quite common.
[It's also not quite clear to me that the criminal consequences were always worse: being incarcerated for a couple months may not be worse than losing your home and everything you spent a lifetime working to earn...]
In my own experience there is an incredible amount of trust in the system there placed on legal professionals-- but given the rarity of serious consequences for misconduct this degree of trust may be misplaced or at least inadequately supervised.
It's not entirely clear to me how it can be fixed however, because if misconduct is handled seriously then that's an invitation to mire every piece of litigation in an impossible maze of misconduct allegations. To make progress there needs to be an assumption that the parties aren't gaslighting about everything -- which obviously means problems when one of them is!
Injustice hiding behind procedure is by no means unique to the UK however. It happens in the US too.
[It's also not quite clear to me that the criminal consequences were always worse: being incarcerated for a couple months may not be worse than losing your home and everything you spent a lifetime working to earn...]
In my own experience there is an incredible amount of trust in the system there placed on legal professionals-- but given the rarity of serious consequences for misconduct this degree of trust may be misplaced or at least inadequately supervised.
It's not entirely clear to me how it can be fixed however, because if misconduct is handled seriously then that's an invitation to mire every piece of litigation in an impossible maze of misconduct allegations. To make progress there needs to be an assumption that the parties aren't gaslighting about everything -- which obviously means problems when one of them is!
Injustice hiding behind procedure is by no means unique to the UK however. It happens in the US too.
My impression is that it's a technical case (not just about software, but really also about how accounting evidence should look) and that it was subverted by misleading testimony from the needed expert witnesses.
I don't disagree that the UK needs to take a long, hard look at its judicial system, but what system is safe from this kind of problem and how so?
I don't disagree that the UK needs to take a long, hard look at its judicial system, but what system is safe from this kind of problem and how so?
Expert witnesses are witnesses to their expertise, not to the actions of a defendant. No conviction should ever be based on the testimony of an expert witness.
A system that does not put people in prison without guilty evidence? Because that was what happened here in all cases. Not faked evidence, worst, lack of evidence...
i agree … in the US this kind of fraud would land the execs in jail, but in the UK we now face the statute of limitations which protects Paula Vennals (PO CEO) and her mates from any real justice since they were able to spin things out for so long. kudos to Private Eye high was the only voice for 2 decades of corruption … this (proper criminal liability) needs to be applied to the water companies, nuclear, etc and to include ministers of state (Ed Davey) and “civil” servants
The BBC title is "NI Post Office ex-investigator apologises to Horizon victims". This submission title makes it sound like the opposite despite the quotes
Agree - the title has been editorialised, which is against the HN rules.
[deleted]
100%?! No system is 100% reliable in a timeframe.
Maybe the system was `eventually` 100% reliable.
There's an impressive amount of detail about what was actually wrong with the system in the judgements from some of the previous cases; I think the main one is this one: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/3408.html
Stepping back a bit, it seems that prosecutors trusted the vendor's statement that the software was "reliable" in the sense that it provided accurate results every time, a subset of which is that it was tamper-proof.
WRONG
Not knowing all the details, it seems that no independent regression or red team testing was done on the software, apparently by choice of the PostOffice and prosecutors and by the inability of defendants to gain the resources or clout to do such proof of unreliability, and also apparently due to the closed black-box nature of the software.
WRONG
Not knowing all the details, it seems that no independent regression or red team testing was done on the software, apparently by choice of the PostOffice and prosecutors and by the inability of defendants to gain the resources or clout to do such proof of unreliability, and also apparently due to the closed black-box nature of the software.
Not only were hundreds of people falsely accused in these cases, they couldn't adequately defend themselves. Now that wrongdoing has been exposed -- the post office knew about this faulty system for years, nobody is charged or going to prison for years of damages due to false prosecutions.