'Horizon IT system was 100% reliable'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Not only were hundreds of people falsely accused in these cases, they couldn't adequately defend themselves. Now that wrongdoing has been exposed -- the post office knew about this faulty system for years, nobody is charged or going to prison for years of damages due to false prosecutions.
I don't disagree that the UK needs to take a long, hard look at its judicial system, but what system is safe from this kind of problem and how so?
Amongst many other issues, The Post Office has a historic freedom to investigate, pursue and prosecute criminal cases on its own behalf- no need to persuade e.g. the police. This has been shown, for anyone with any doubt, to be a massive conflict of interest. Another repeated occurrence is the discovery that the Post Office claimed, but would not provide evidence and used this 'position' to bully people into accepting plea bargains. Essentially the Post Office dishonestly and deliberately abused its position in numerous cases to bypass the legal system in each of the home nations so that defendants would simply turn up in court to plead guilty and be sentenced. Had these cases been required to meet the standards of a conventional criminal investigation and trial in any of the UK home nations, many more of them would have failed to convict.
[It's also not quite clear to me that the criminal consequences were always worse: being incarcerated for a couple months may not be worse than losing your home and everything you spent a lifetime working to earn...]
In my own experience there is an incredible amount of trust in the system there placed on legal professionals-- but given the rarity of serious consequences for misconduct this degree of trust may be misplaced or at least inadequately supervised.
It's not entirely clear to me how it can be fixed however, because if misconduct is handled seriously then that's an invitation to mire every piece of litigation in an impossible maze of misconduct allegations. To make progress there needs to be an assumption that the parties aren't gaslighting about everything -- which obviously means problems when one of them is!
Injustice hiding behind procedure is by no means unique to the UK however. It happens in the US too.
WRONG
Not knowing all the details, it seems that no independent regression or red team testing was done on the software, apparently by choice of the PostOffice and prosecutors and by the inability of defendants to gain the resources or clout to do such proof of unreliability, and also apparently due to the closed black-box nature of the software.