"There is no direct evidence of her taking any money [...] She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched." (The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.) "Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?"
My word against yours wouldn't be enough to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the Post Office's word backed up by a computer system? It seems that was convincing enough for the jury. They gave a guilty verdict in the above case.
Surely the system must be able to spit out what services and products were sold and how much they would be worth.
Many commentators are saying that this presumption should be changed:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/12/update-law-o...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2024/01/15/law-o...
I guess part of then problem is that the justice system takes every case in isolation, but the legal system really needs some mechanism where there’s a “hang on, something is wrong here” after the first few…
First change in this case specifically is probably stopping the archaic convention of the post office making their own prosecutions in the UK…