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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

One has to wonder how bad the justice system has to be if a trial is unable to surface the truth in this rather trivial case.

And it failed multiple times.

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England's legal system is still riddled with the legacy of feudalism. The private prosecution mechanism used by the Post Office was first used in the 17th Century.

Note that Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner. Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland.

>Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland.

They were, though through the usual public mechanism by the Procurator Fiscal

> Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner

Scotland's legal system prosecuted and jailed Craig Murray. It also prosecuted Alex Salmond, who was unanimously acquitted by a jury; but Craig didn't benefit from a jury. The chief prosecutor is a member of the government, and controls police investigations.

In the case of a political prosecution, I wouldn't describe the Scottish system as "saner".

Craig Murray identified complainants who's identity had been protected by court order.

What did you expect to happen?

Not really; that's "jigsaw identification", i.e. identification is only possible by combining multiple reports. It was not possible to identify complainants just by reading Craig's blog. Other journalists, whose writings could be used to directly identify complainants, were not prosecuted.

Did he supply a crucial missing piece of the puzzle then?

The prosecution case was that he provided a piece of the puzzle. I have no reason to believe it was a crucial piece.

I was reading his blog while all this was going on. Despite my curiosity, I was unable to get any clues about who the letter-women were. But I'm not Scottish, I'm not involved with the Scottish National Party, and I don't hang around with SNP politicians (or any politicians).

Perhaps someone who mixed in those circles could have found clues; I understand that several Sottish journalists published pieces from which a knowledgeable reader could deduce who was being referred to. But I believe Murray was pretty scrupulous in avoiding violating the judge's order.

I think it's obvious he was persecuted for his trenchant support of Alex Salmond.

That reminds me of one of the cases against Tommy Robinson (in 2018). As far as I could tell from abroad, he really didn't disclose anything that hadn't already been disclosed in traditional media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_(far-right_acti...

And even if he did -- there is something wrong with a justice system that would let that lead to these guys going free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang

Reading the dates (years!) relevant to the case is enough to make anyone shutter -- first complaint taken seriously (allegedly) was in 2011 and the arrests didn't happen until 2017.

Some cases seem to be more about politics than about the law (let alone justice).

---

Do I have to say it? I probably do. I think Robinson is an idiot. A football hooligan who seems to have oppositional defiant disorder.

He is also right that there is a problem with Muslim crime in the UK -- and their grooming gangs seem to be a huge problem and there has indisputably been a cover up of it.

My recollection is that there was no crucial piece that was not around the same time also reported in the mass media. Why this was dismissed as apparently not being relevant as a defence was confusing (if I recall correctly, something about media being self-regulating through a professional association and blogs not being so, which doesn’t seem to matter when a reporter in the media did the exact same thing with no consequences that Murray was jailed for)

> Craig Murray identified complainants

He didn't. His reporting included facts that the police and judge claimed could be used to identify people. Many of these facts were also public knowledge anyone following the case likely already knew. These were the same police who brought the failed charges against Salmond. The entire case stinks of corruption and many people including Noam Chomsky have publically backed Murray.

[0] https://www.thenational.scot/news/18486299.global-figures-in...

Look, if at judge warns me that I have published information that may be used to identify an person who's identify is under legal order and I continue and repeatedly publish further information that may be used to identify the person what do you expect to happen?

Yes, Craig Murray's imprisonment was a travesty. Saying a legal system is saner than England is pretty much damning with faint praise, it's such a low bar to clear.

Partly its to do with the people in the courtroom not knowing enough about IT, so that when the Post Office claimed their massive late 90s XML based hub-and-spoke database with 13,000 spokes was 'robust' it was taken as a given. Whereas anyone in IT could look at the architecture and think "well, there's bound to be all kinds of bugs in there".

I mean, they had expert witnesses and stuff. But I've been reading about this in Private Eye for years, and as an IT person you read it and think 'yes those people are totally being fucked over because the organisation is hiding the bugs that obviously lurk in their enterprisey system' whereas for non-technical people it was less obvious.

Surely they could have checked the accounting and then verified what products and services were sold and what the total owed should have been.

If there were duplicated entries, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

So even before the system came into question, basic accounting should have been used.

Yes, you’d think so, but the Post Office “auditors” didn’t do that and just blindly believed what the computer said the balance should be.

And judges sent people to jail based on that. They should all lose their positions.

The post office was acting as victim, investigator, and prosecutor and simply lied or withheld evidence to ensure that the defence had nothing to work with and the jury had nothing to contradict that view. It's absolutely batshit levels of corruption and there must be severe consequences.

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