People were sent to jail on the basis of a single number spat out from a black box called Horizon.
And to charge someone of false accounting when the system didn't give them much of an option and they communicated it to the helpline baffles me. It seems like their lawyers were pretty useless.
Something also has to be done about the unjust consequences of plea bargaining. Many were convicted on the basis that they admitted to crimes that they did not commit.
I think we also have to get rid of Magistrate's courts and private prosecutions. It's ridiculous that these still exist in a modern state that operates under the presumption of the rule of law.
One exception would be one barrister who it seemed to be to express genuine regret. Even he said he was in denial for a long time and only came to the realisation recently.
Nuremberg has entered the chat.
But really, to me, the full blame should be on the Post Office, and those involved.
Trying to conceal problems? Purposefully ignoring bugs? Not listening to, well, everyone. Lying to the courts?
People need to be in jail, and starting at the top.
I'm not going to absolve Fujitsu, but I have worked government contracts in Canada. They constantly change, morph requirements, not for any real reasons other than "Oh you build this entire thing? We didn't think of X, let's add that".
Meanwhile, X basically means an entire rewrite.
I've even had situations where "Let's add X" happens, then after done, "Aw, never mind, remove that".
It's a different world.
> Agree that the courts are somewhat to blame.
> But really, to me, the full blame should be on the Post Office, and those involved.
Anyway.
> They constantly change, morph requirements
All software systems are like that. Even if they weren't, the moment a new law comes in you'd need to change them anyway. If the engineering process and build can't withstand change, that's a problem.
It seems clear that the Post Office and Fujitsu were complicit in the coverup, and the justice system utterly failed the defendants. All three are so poorly behaved, I hope some change will be triggered. Sadly, I think the way of the world is all organisations regress to the mean, and lots of them are allowed to let their mean get pretty low.
I don’t mean to diminish the culpability of all those involved in the coverup, but the system needs fixing more than they need punishment. Fixing the system has a chance of preventing future harm, punishment does not, at least not to the same extend.
This wasn't cogs in a machine that went awry, this was intentional malicious behavior.
Handwaving about "fixing a system" is begging th question. No system made by humans can resist malice of those humans.
But there are a few key points that made it essentially impossible for the accused postmasters to defend themselves against the allegations, among them as a key point the presumption that computer records are correct and must be challenged by the defendant, not proven by prosecution. And to challenge these, you’d need to have the internal records that you can’t access as defendant - no surprise that many of the accused entered a plea deal, knowing that they’d never stand a chance in a trial.
Then, the Post office boasting powers to investigate and bring cases, while not being held to the same standards as the Crown Prosecution, meaning no independent review, no challenge.
This basically made all efforts to defend hopeless, and you can see the results. The cases did turn on the outstanding work of a few heroic individuals and a stroke of luck - if not for those, this all would have gone away quietly, with the postmaster convicted, broken, silenced.
A system that allows for that is broken, and the same thing will happen again, unless the shortfalls are addressed, because careless, negligent and even somewhat malicious individuals are plenty, and heroic people defending are rare.
I can recommend reading this, which sheds some light on the legal details that made the scandal possible at this scale. https://emptycity.substack.com/p/how-the-legal-system-made-i...
Some systems have a better chance of resisting a few malicious actors within than others.
There's no reason not to do both: punish the people who broke the law and also think how in the future we might prevent such a disaster happening again (or expose it sooner, or minimize the damage it can do)
I saw this directly in California too. State employee bureaucrats changing the spec and deliverables, even on tight deadline or high priority results.
The lies and coverup from the Postal service and Fujitsu were to there to hide the flaws in the system from the courts and the defendants. Even the prosecutors have said that they were completely in the dark. It’s only now that the independent reports are out that everyone knows the details.
Unless you know about the bugs in the system, the itemized transaction list makes it look exactly like the cashiers were pocketing cash and not actually ringing up the sales. It’s a classic scam that any competent retail manager or owner knows to guard against. The only difference is that these cashiers nominally own the stores they run. If they pocketed the cash from the sale of a candy bar then there would be no crime; the cash was theirs to begin with. But since they are also working for a third party (the post office), the possibility of theft is a real one.
You would assume so, but the whole problem was that the Horizon computer system would lose transactions. It might lose the transaction where the customer paid by credit/debit, and the post office received the money directly. Or it might lose the transaction that recorded the check the postmaster sent to the post office to reconcile accounts. Again, the Horizon system never had a reliable record of what transactions had actually happened. Once there were discrepancies, it was always easy for it to look like the postmaster had made a mistake or committed theft.
I took an “Accounting for managers” course back in the nineties which included double entry book-keeping - we were taught to never erase a mistake but create additional entries to correct any error. You’d think something like Horizon would adhere to agreed standards of record keeping and have a signed and immutable event log at the very least.
Imagine if you were on trial where the evidence against you came from, say, a computerised breathalyser.
You might argue that the code has bugs. Then that the configuration was wrong. Then that the hardware design was faulty. Then that the individual components were broken. Then that the data was altered in transmission. Then that a hacker got in. Then that a cosmic ray corrupted the data. And so on.
The defendant has no proof that the evidence is faulty, and the producers of the evidence can demonstrate (to some degree) that their hardware & software are correct.
At some point, the court has to accept the evidence presented to it. In the UK, at the moment, the assumption is that a computer is operating correctly unless shown otherwise.
The BCS (I'm a member) goes in to a little detail about why they think this presumption should change https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/computer-i...
Print out the transactions with their timestamps and it feels this should have been very clearly a computer error given the duplicates etc.
To me, that sounds like an accounting system made by people who fundamentally didn't understand the point of double-entry accounting, because a double-entry accounting system that uses hidden or untracked accounts entirely removes that point and is just equivalent to a single-entry accounting system. Presumably, if all those transactions were properly stored and then combined, a full double-entry ledger could be reconstructed, but it appears the system itself couldn't do that in at least some cases.
Of course, there also seems to be the suggestion that part of the Post Office's argument to subpostmasters was that even if the problems were obvious, like clear duplicate transactions, they were still liable per the contract.