The UK post office database scandal – “can't see the bug = user is a thief”

postofficescandal.uk

9 points·benedictevans··2 comments

Today in the UK Post Office database scandal: this support engineer spent an hour looking at an error report, couldn’t see anything obviously causing it, and so decided it was OK to go to court and testify in a criminal trial that they were sure there were no bugs and the user was a thief.

Back-story - Fujitsu built a database for the UK Post Office that had bugs that led to cash balances disappearing. They refused to accept there could be any bugs, and the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of people over the 'missing' money. There were suicides.

According to Wikipedia, "After some convicted SPMs successfully sued the Post Office, 555 convictions were declared unsafe and to have been obtained unlawfully."

555 wrongful convictions in British courts alone, related to a single corporate entity.

A small glimpse into the scale of atrocities committed by "justice" systems every day. I have no doubt that wrongful convictions account for double-digit percentages of the total, in every country. Which is absolutely insane, because it means that in a typical prison housing a few hundred inmates, there are dozens of innocent people.

And hardly a mention of it in the mainstream press, at least not compared to its impact. This should have been front page every day for the past 20 years.

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