BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions:<p>The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government.<p>Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows.<p>But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts are constitutionally independent - and that means a second option could be difficult too.<p>Parliament could pass an act declaring that all the Horizon convictions be quashed, but that would be an unprecedented meddling in the work of judges - and it would pave the way for politicians to do it again.<p>The third option is a mass appeal with a crystal clear submission to Court of Appeal judges that the state no longer believes the convictions should stand. There’s a precedent for this - 39 post office cases were overturned in one go in 2021.<p>But running such a case would not be easy - and it could still take years to resolve.
To clarify how this happened: in the UK anyone can bring a private prosecution where they effectively <i>act as the prosecutor</i>. This is usually used by charities who take on laws to prosecute (eg., crimes against animals).<p>Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes <i>against the post office</i>. So they were both the prosecutor and the victim.<p>This gave them overwhelming incentives not to reveal all evidence to the defence, and indeed they hit many reports on these computer systems.<p>That is a crime; and I imagine senior staff at the post office should be themselves prosectued.<p>But the underlying issue is the gap in the law where private prosecution by companies is permitted even when they're the victims and when they hold all the evidence. This is the mechanism which created the insanity.
If anyone wants to see a good example of the enquiry questioning, here's an excerpt.<p>Software bugs ruin lives, but corruption allows it to happen.<p>People, normal people, small postmasters, killed themselves after being wrongly disgraced for financial fraud while the C-suite of the Post Office falsified their accounting to award themselves bonuses.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/CQzrB3kuqck?si=8tE2DGhKdGXLFxsy" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/CQzrB3kuqck?si=8tE2DGhKdGXLFxsy</a>
My wife was watching the ITV drama on this last night and I had to leave the room. It was making me so incredibly angry that such huge injustices can be allowed to take place. I recommend the show to anyone with better control of their emotions that me!
Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.
If you're in the UK, the Panorama documentary on this from 2022 is really worth watching - <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016t20/panorama-the-post-office-scandal" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016t20/panorama-the-...</a>
As I said in another submission, people sent other people to jail through negligence and deliberate cover ups. People were bankrupted and had money extorted from them. The only remedy for this is jail time for those involved. They should lose liberty, have their name dragged through the mud and gave financial ruin. Make the time fit the crime<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931792">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931792</a>
Fujitsu’s non-executive chairman until 2019, Simon Blagden has donated £376,000 to the Conservative party.<p>"Despite Fujitsu suing the Government over its failed NHS IT project on his watch, Mr Blagden, who was said to have dined regularly with PM Theresa May, was awarded a CBE in 2016 for services to the economy."<p><a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fujitsu-exposed-real-culprit-behind-31845530" rel="nofollow">https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fujitsu-exposed-real-...</a>
Further IT related miscarriages of justice are a likely consequence of the recent 'digital transformation' of the UK's courts service - see <a href="https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk" rel="nofollow">https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk</a><p>The case management software now used within the justice system itself is deeply flawed and poses a risk to large numbers of cases including child protection, benefit appeals, divorce and probate.
A similar, software based debt-recovery occurred in Australia from 2016-2020 [1]. The government of the day in 2015 figured they could recover ~$1.5B by automating some of the processes, since there were not enough people to investigate all the possible instances. The main issue was that the software scheme used averaging, which in some cases was not accurate.<p>As in this story, despite people immediately claiming issue with some of the methods, it was pursued for years. And again, in several cases it tragically resulted in suicides.<p>In the end, after ~$1.8B of repayments and a royal commission, a couple of people resigned but there was - at least in my view - no significant repercussions for the decision makers and responsible parties at the time.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme</a>
It’s another example of the British establishment and media blaming “computer glitches” and “the system”. A buggy accounting system on its own cannot cause such a disaster, unlike a buggy avionics system or a Therac-25.<p>This scandal would not have happened if the people in power had rightly been skeptical of the output of an accounting system that had been called into disrepute by several employees.<p>People did this. People chose to prosecute. People lied. The courts accepted dodgy evidence. The scandal is the post office employees, the solicitors, the courts, and the Fujitsu employees, not the buggy accounting system. People took the output of an accounting system as though it had come down from a mountain on a stone tablet.
Another horrendous scandal in the UK was Operation Ore, twenty years ago. Thousands of people were falsely accused of purchasing child pornography because their credit card numbers were stolen and used by fraudsters.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore#Controversies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore#Controversies</a>
I'm following this from the UK. I watched the first episode of "Bates vs Post Office". It's interesting to see that the Horizon system, set up in 1999, was a client-server model with a box in each post office syncing with a central server. I'm surprised they thought this would work back then, given the challenges like network problems, failures and backup and the sheer volume of data. To me, it seems like the technology wasn't available back then. They had a big idea for a paperless system, and the tech team scrambled to build something without checking feasibility.
I always used to wonder why the folks at the cash register always make it a point to print the transaction slip in the pos machine and securing the paper in their drawers, when everything's recorded electronically already.<p>Not any more.
Covering up a crime should carry the same sentence as the crime.<p>Putting an innicent person in jail should carry the maximum sentence the innocent person could have received.<p>The problem is then they cover up even more.
> Post Office Ltd had ordered Second Sight to end its investigation just one day before the report was due to be published, and to destroy all the paperwork that it had not handed over.<p>Gosh dang it.
Evidently, there is now a legislative push for parliament to reverse these convictions:<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0h48cft" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0h48cft</a><p>“UK to bring in law to quash wrongful Post Office convictions”<p>According to the BBC Global News Podcast “The legal step followed public outrage after a TV”
Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.
I predict the next big scandal of this kind will involve AI of some form (not least because you can sell any code more complicated than a spreadsheet as AI these days). The post office scandal shows that you can horribly mess up "trust the computers" even before AI or "smart" systems were a thing.
So.... In a lot of these cases the system wrongly reported money missing at these lower levels. It seems these numbers should have rolled up into sums at a higher level that also showed losses and they prosecuted people. But the money was never actually missing so where did it go? Hmmm?
Dupe/Related discussion on current event:<p><i>Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930011">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930011</a>
The TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that made the TV drama?
> The Post Office agreed to settle out of court for £58 million. The subpostmasters' legal costs amounted to £47 million, leaving them with only about £20,000 each.<p>Something's obscenely wrong here.
The article seems to consist mostly of abstruse legal wrangling, is there a TL:DR of the actual bug(s) at hand? There was some mention of Fujitsu rabidly denying remote access only for it to be revealed they actually did have this, was it some kind of sync error or something more malicious?
In middle of this it's obscene how the media neglects to mention who did most of the actual investigative journalism: <a href="https://www.private-eye.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.private-eye.co.uk/</a> -- for years on end, whilst the issue was ignored by the rest of the press.<p>They all now jump in on it and elide the years of work put in by the PE. This is a common tactic in media outlets, esp. here, for the major sources to try to "own" issues with nearly zero work put in on them.
This thing has layers.<p>It's scandalous that a £billion computer system had basic accounting errors.<p>It's scandalous that Fujitsu pressured the government to accept the system, and scandalous that the government gave in to this pressure.<p>It's scandalous how the private prosecution hid evidence.<p>It's scandalous how long it takes the courts to rectify miscarriages of justice.<p>It's scandalous that it took a popular TV show to get the government's attention.