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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The Post Office historically was wholly owned by the UK Government, so maintained its own private prosecutors instead of relying on the Crown Prosecution Service. This is why it was able to fight so hard to get convictions, they had the funds to pay their own expensive lawyers to do it.

This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!

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A good and sad example why trifecta and separation of powers is important in democracy.

No one should share the role of prosecutor, jury and judge.

This was a regular court process, with an independent judge and jury. It’s just the prosecution was run directly by the post office and not the public prosecutor.

It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.

It's not quite regular. Normally, the (purported) victim and the prosecutor are not the same person. That's another thing that has been highlighted by this case: the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself, rather than them being prosecuted independently by the Crown Prosecution Service.

(More on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076)

The CPS also "successfully" prosecuted some cases based on the same evidence. If your key complainants are fabricating evidence that looks solid to a jury, separation of powers is not going to save you from the power of the state.

As I said in a related comment: if I looked hard enough, I imagine I'd also be able to find similar miscarriages of justice in the USA, too.

The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

Whereas a generic prosecutor has a bunch of cases of reports from victims that are not related to them, and thus if a case is not sufficiently strong, they'd normally just pick another case where the evidence is strong. They also have the responsibility to independently review the evidence from victims and police. These procedural checks didn't apply in the post office cases.

The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.

> The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

I know what they wrote.

> The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.

I pointed out the CPS itself also prosecuted cases based on the bad evidence provided to them, so the procedural checks also did nothing.

I think we're basically on the same page, diverging only on speculative items.

Do note that the fact that CPS prosecuted cases does not mean the CPS didn't throw out dubious cases. We only know the ones they did prosecute, but we don't know how many (if any) they did not prosecute. As I said, this is speculation.

I also speculate that if you send hundreds of fraud cases to the CPS they might be suspicious why the rate of criminal fraud among the post office workers is so high.

I agree there's no evidence that the "private" prosecutions made things worse, but it surely didn't help, and deprived the system of an opportunity (whether it would have been taken or not) to prevent the miscarriages in the first place.

Honestly, the fact the Post Office were marking their own homework almost certainly made everything worse, in my opinion. I’m just taking issue with the idea that it was the sole cause, as we similar things happen under different systems, too.

> I know what they wrote.

Clearly you do not, as I made no complaint; but merely pointed out how it wasn't quite the regular court process that tomalpha said it to be, and pointed out another thing that has been highlighted by the case. As it has been. A lot more people know this about Post Office Ltd than used to, and it is oft-discussed when the subject comes up.

Post Office Ltd is not "the state". At least nominally. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century. As I just said, one of the things that this has highlighted for people is that a private company has a normal practice of pursuing criminal prosecutions (for fraud in this case) privately, rather than via the Crown Prosecution Service which is normal practice for almost every other private company or organization when it comes to criminal matters.

More on which, again, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076. And more on the expected consequences of this coming to widespread public attention, and another private organization that is a prolific private prosecutor, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969548.

You’re correct, it’s not any more. I’m saying it used to be ;-)

> the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself

Any private citizen or business in the UK has a right to prosecute crimes. It just costs a lot of money, so you can imagine how it's used (spoiler: large companies/wealthy individuals against poor people).

You should have read the more-on-which first. (-:

The Crown Prosecution Service also has the power to take over a case that is being prosecuted privately, and if they decide to take no further action on it, then the person/company that was doing the private prosecution no longer can.

It was only the prosecutor, not the judge or jury. The issue is that the Post Office lied to the judge and jury about their evidence.

There were a (relatively) small number of prosecutions from the CPS as well, which suffered from the same problem: the Post Office investigators gave the same bad evidence, which they used to convince a jury to convict.

I don't see how separation of powers helps here. I'm sure if I looked, I'd find cases in the USA where the police and/or prosecutors told a pack of lies based on dodgy evidence to secure convictions of serious crimes, too.

Prosecuting directly meant there was no outside eyes on a lot of the cases, no questions about if it was actually in the public interest to prosecute, or external assessment of the evidence before pushing for plea deals.

It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors' - because fully independent prosecutors should be rejecting cases with dodgy evidence. The police can get a bit grumpy with CPS for being quite strict at times - but it holds them to work their next case properly.

The PO clearly managed to convince the CPS in a number of cases, but had they had to do that for all there would have been a lot less cases prosecuted in total, and I think there would have been questions about their system a lot sooner.

It might not have avoided the problem, but it would have been much needed additional oversight into what they were doing.

> It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors'

So the separation of powers isn’t a magic solution to the problem then.

We know they lied. Do we know specifically if they have been shown to have committed perjury?

I don’t think they perjured themselves which isn’t the same as saying they didn’t lie. It’s easy to not perjure yourself if you’re not asked the right questions.

The lie came from the fact they weren’t looking into their own evidence and realising something was up when they were prosecuting hundreds of sub-postmasters.

There’s been so much misconduct in public office I just wish there were some open and shut cases.

In the US the police are specifically allowed to lie to suspects, whereas British cops are not. If you can prove the police lied in a recorded interview or something used in evidence in court that's going to be a big problem for prosecutors in the UK but not in the US where it's expected.

Prosecutor and victim, extremely bad combination when a powerful organization is involved.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968431

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