Plenty of obvious villains in this story but where was the legal system in all this? 900 prosecutions without any real evidence or just because “the computer says so”? As one of the 3 pillars, isn’t the legal system and judiciary supposed to act as a backstop against this sort of capricious mass-persecution of completely innocent people?
Here are the judge's instructions to the jury for one of the trials:
"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." (The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.) "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?"
My word against yours wouldn't be enough to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the Post Office's word backed up by a computer system? It seems that was convincing enough for the jury. They gave a guilty verdict in the above case.
This sort of thing is why I've always hated the concept of a random jury from the general populace - In this example, I don't want Joe Bloggs the butcher's understanding of complex computer systems being the determination of whether I am criminally convicted, I want 12 people who have at least some experience programming.
I find it funny that juries are something that some people think is immutable while it's something that's unique to Anglo legal system. The first time I see jury in American media I'm immediately confused on why a random person can decide a court like that.
The problem was that it was more like a bank. Person gives you $9k cash, you add that to their account but it doesn't work so you push the button again. Now the computer thinks you should have $18k more cash in the till but there's only $9k there. There's no way for a bookkeeper to know that you didn't take that extra money.
One of the problems is that the UK legal system has a presumption that computers are reliable. They are assumed to be working properly unless proved otherwise, which shifts the burden of proof on the person trying to claim that they are not working properly.
Many commentators are saying that this presumption should be changed:
This was coupled by the victims being lied to that they were the only ones. Had they known this was systematic they could have mounted a more effective defence.
This is the real failure. The software is neither smart nor dumb, it’s a machine. In this case, it was broken, but people who actually have the ability to critically analyze and judge situations deferred to the output of a machine that they have no real visibility into the internals of, and took its output as gospel.
The post office can draw its own prosecutions - no need for the prosecution service etc., and in general, a magistrate confronted with His Majesty’s Postal Service’s Honourable Legal Team (OBE, CBE) and This Dirty Bloke With a Regional Accent What We Reckon Stole From Us will chose the government every time.
Incredible that literally hundreds of people were apparently in the same situation - none of them had any paper trail of money being moved into their accounts, no unexplained wealth, no extravagant spending… All of them just that the computer said so!
I guess part of then problem is that the justice system takes every case in isolation, but the legal system really needs some mechanism where there’s a “hang on, something is wrong here” after the first few…
First change in this case specifically is probably stopping the archaic convention of the post office making their own prosecutions in the UK…
