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Comment by didntcheck | Hacker News Reader

The last time I looked into the Post Office scandal, the impression I got was that "we just had too much faith in the IT system!" was a convenient story, but the high-ups knew full well about the problems, and full well that they were persecuting innocent people, but did it anyway to cover up their own failings. If so, people need to see substantial jail terms for this. Perverting the course of justice is no misdemeanor. There's even allegations that Paula Vennells knowingly lied to Parliament

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There is substantial evidence that the people in power in the Post Office Board dismissed the evidence from the sub post masters because they were, more often than not of Asian descent (Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani,...). So the Post Office Board had a mental block to joining the dots because they were racist.

When they were eventually confronted with the overwhelming evidence of hundreds of false convictions they doubled down because they lack any sense of morality.

So while it is a sad technical tale it is also an indictment of British Board room culture.

The whole sorry affair has been covered by Private Eye magazine for over ten years.

Private Eye is an absolute gem. It’s quite quirky and jokey but it’s the real deal if you want to know how this country is really run.

> they doubled down because they lack any sense of morality.

I don't believe you know what their internal mental states are.

We can and do reasonably infer mental states from actions.

If someone knows they are sending innocent people to prison, benefits from doing so, and continues doing so we can reasonably infer they lack morality.

Most internal mental states that have any impact on the actions of an individual are leaky. That is because they affect actual real world actions.

So given a set of actions you can infer a likely set of mental states — this is also done in the court room. Can you always infer with 100% accuracy and with every colorful detail fleshed out? No. Do you typically need to? No.

> this is also done in the court room.

And we have we gone through that process to look at the issue from all sides and hear arguments from all parties? No.

You don't need to know intent to fire or punish someone anyway. In this case we can dismiss people for improper action, without demeaning them personally.

If you read my post again you will notice I didn't say anything about the situation at hand. I just refuted your general statement that one cannot reason about mental states from the visible actions.

I agree that one should be cautious with early accusations or hopping on trains just because they are rolling.

And if you read what I said, before your comment, you'll see its about this particular situation.

Yeah, but my comment doesn't has to be. I am allowed to go into your direction, generalize your statement or put it into a different environment and examine it. How else should people discuss things?

Why say punishment via rules can solve this, in other words, putting people in cages at the end of the day (or in other cases, taxing a permitted behavior), instead of advocate for structurally removing that power from them?

Punishment is an intermediate solution.

Holding executives responsible for their misdeeds is the bare minimum in the meantime.

Do you think an increase in punishment the executives expected would have led to the problems for subpostmasters being resolved faster or slower?

It doesn’t matter either way, they need to be punished for the way they treated the people who were under their power.

Will punishment cause time-travel, you mean? Probably not.

Consider it as either a counter factual or a question about similar events in future.

Am I inferring correctly that you are suggesting I may cause a perverse incentive, wherein they would be more motivated to cover it up due to the potential of punishment? I don't think that applies, as the punishment I'm suggesting is for the cover-up and knowing prosecution of innocent people, so the incentive would be to not do that. Not to mention they already seemed fully motivated to continue saving face anyway

Having rich people face actual material consequences to their life, rather than "punishments" like losing a job or honor, would hopefully reduce corporate malpractice, yes, as they now know that they are not invincible (obligatory note that I am talking about criminal responsibility, not suggesting we do away with LLCs or something)

I think that might be an effect, but I’m not sure. If something like this were to happen again, the thing I would most want would be whatever rules would most speedily lead to any prosecutions against subpostmasters being sopped and any convictions being overturned (with just compensation for the wrongful convictions).

I think to achieve that it has to be better in expectancy for someone who knows about the problem (and widely believed by that person too) to act sooner to resolve the problem than to try to cover things up, but I don’t really know what rules would help. For example, maybe an alternative thing that would work would be some kind of whistleblower rules like in finance[1].

In the hypothetical where I am stood with my hand on the lever choosing between stopping the scandal sooner and letting executives off entirely or having more wrongful convictions for longer but later throwing the executives in jail, I will choose the former every time, even though it feels unjust.

[1] In finance the whistleblower rules are designed to incentivise people to not be accomplices to crimes done by their superiors/coworkers. The incentives must be high because, no matter what the rules say about it, whistleblowers will expect to not work in finance again after blowing the whistle. The rules work because those large-scale financial crimes generally are hard to without one’s competent colleagues finding out.

Your question makes a good point. Punishment is only effective at the bottom of the funnel.

A well designed system, whether a computer or an organization should always have controls that guide things to where they should be. That means carrots and sticks.

In a place like a post office, that means separation of duties, audit, and clear lines of accountability. Things fail when nobody asks awkward questions or looks.

I do think that leadership responsible for a debacle like this must be punished. Their incompetence destroyed lives of innocent people.

In principle there was already some separation of duty as solictors in England owe a duty to the Court regardless of who pays them. However it seems not to have been enough in this case. Hopefully will be looked into.

I think you mean barristers.

The problem here was that as many sub-postmasters were co owned by a husband and wife with children. There was an enormous incentive for one of the sub post masters to plead guilty and say, "my wife had nothing to do with it." Doubly so as the sentences would often be on the cusp of the "suspendible range", a guilty plea combined with contrition is much more likely to get a judge to suspend your sentence if he can.

Of course, this "plea-bargaining" is standard practice in the states but we aren't used to it in the UK.

The issue is that no barrister would allow their client to plead guilty without giving them a little canned speech about not pleading guilty if they didn't do it and having them, "sign their brief".

I meant the solictor of the Post Office -- solicitors in England are both classified as officers of the court and owe duties to the Court. So amongst other things Post Office's own solicitors should have declined to act in any way that could mislead the court.

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