Bill advances to exonerate hundreds in Post Office Horizon scandal The mass exoneration of wrongfully convicted Post Office managers caught up in the Horizon IT scandal has come a step closer in the UK after MPs passed the third stage of a government bill. The latest stage of the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill passed unopposed last night as part of the government's plans to quash …
Although I agree in principle with the desired outcome, it massively steps over the accepted norms of the separation of powers between legislature, executive and judiciary.
Slippery slope …. already fucked over by Boris Johnson proroguing Parliament unlawfully, and Sunak’s Government passing badly drafted and unlawful acts (Rwanda Act).
Not going to end well. With climate change the UK will indeed become a Banana Republic.
Really, how hard is it for the legal profession to work a few *well paid* weekends to do this normally, legally and safely - at pace.
The judicial system hasn’t exactly shown themselves to be trustworthy or impartial.
For example, judge allowing POL to hid disclosure from defence due to “public interest”. A procedure that’s meant to allow protection of security services methods, etc. Not for keeping a bunch of executives from criticism.
Also, it seems to be a lot of lawyers had no ethical or professional concerns over what they were doing. And now all are claiming to be incompetent rather than face up to what they did.
The problem is that the government could, and should, be more aggressive but chooses to simply ignore failures and/or throw more money at the problem in the hopes things might turn out right
Private Eye would be just another comic if the government started to get their finger out and started to fight back rather than ignore reports and inquiries into yet more failures
That is not enough. We need to revise laws and court practice around electronic evidence to stop something like this happening again.
The developer of software should not be the only expert witness to software being sufficiently reliable to be relied on in a criminal case. They cannot possibly be impartial.
This was exacerbated by the issue of the Post Office still having powers to bring criminal prosecutions. The Police used to have this power - until everyone realized this was a bad idea after multiple flawed prosecutions and the CPS was subsequently formed. I suspect the Post Office's powers don't have long left on the statute books.
However the DWP are angling for and the govt heavily in favour of giving them police powers of arrest, search , seizure and the ability to levy fines in the tens of thousands without any option to appeal, without recourse to the courts and without any need for the DWP to get court order or warrant
The UK is now the Soviet Union/North Korea
Yep, those baying for equal pay for everyone will soon get a rude awakening when they realise nobody will seek to excel, and everyone switches to doing the bare minimum required to get paid.
Some people really do need to give their head a wobble, but nobody dares speak out against such piffle on the account of being labelled by the feckless social media morons.
"The developer of software should not be the only expert witness to software being sufficiently reliable to be relied on in a criminal case. "
Adding on to this the CPS should pay for audits of the software on forensic machines. There have been cases in the US of two different DNA sequencing machines (from different vendors) generating different data from the same DNA sample.
The article says that Fujitsu later bought ICL. In fact, they already owned the bulk of it (80%) by the time development on Horizon started, and they'd bought ICL outright by the point it was being rolled out in the late 90s.
By which point it was *already* known there were major problems with it.
It’s called Murdochitis.
As originally demonstrated at the Leveson Inquiry into Phone Hacking..
‘Didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, don’t know anything’. (Cough) … After all … I’m just the lowly CEO/Chairman).
* fairly sure lying at a formal public inquiry is contempt of court, perverting the course of justice and for the statutory office bearers in Government and at the state Post Office is misconduct in a public office - over and above what done within the Post Office.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/misconduct-public-office
Some jail-time is needed.
Sounds like bollocks.
... expecting the article to show the bill would ...
Clearly state that all those responsible for the damage and incredible grief caused to those affected by ... the sheer extent of the Post Office's prosecutorial misconduct ... will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. ie: no fines, effective jail time.
And that the Fujitsu corporation, besides being sentenced to pay a very hefty sum to each and every PO employee affected, would be banned for the next 30 years from being able to bid on any public contract in the UK, this including any of their subsidiaries or related companies.
But as things go, more and more it looks that this huge stain on the UK government/justice system will go the way of the Grenfell cladding scandal.
Maybe it is time to make a film about that one too?
.
Fujitsu has signed 5-10 years "secret" deals with HMRC to continue running old insecure systems with MASSIVE problems.
officially the contract looks like its for 12months, but the conditions go down to "in unexpected circumstances, the contract can be extended for a further 5 to 9 years".
Which is the plan. to "fail" to replace FJ in critical contracts where they have direct access (just like Horizon) to manipulate and edit taxpayers records for money laundering purposes.
1. The bill is for the sole purpose of making good the victims ASAP. Do you really want to delay it by loading it up with extraneous stuff?
2. There is ample provision in existing criminal law for prosecuting those responsible.
3. Determining who is responsible is a task for the courts, not for Parliament. Catch-all wording suchas "all those responsible" in a Bill would undoubtedly tie the courts up for years on points of interpretation and naming specific individuals in the Bill would require investigation that would hold it back for years (see point 1) and set a horrendous precedent for imprisonment by government fiat.
2. Is very much discretionary. It can be "deprioritised" forever.
I mean, if law was effective and institutions that are supposed to protect us from corruption were not corrupt themselves, the issues would have been caught well before so many lives were wrecked and people responsible would have been doing time.
But for some reason when institutions are doing something glaringly bad, it's always a conspiracy theory and those who are supposed to investigate hide their heads in the sand.
Usually, conspiracies aren't in place to commit bad deeds but to cover up cockups and preserve the jobs of those responsible
This appears to be an exception, given the bad deeds were performed to coverup problems which were claimed to have been fixed before Pathways was renamed to Horizons
Private Eye has been highlighting it for years, too.
I agree that the television brought it to the notice of a wider public (who don't know or believe anything unless it's on the box), but despite this I think it unlikely that the government would be so keen to suddenly take action if there wasn't an election soon.
It is really a shitshow: nothing like waiting up to a quarter of a century! to say you're "fixing" something.
Meanwhile, what have the affected victims been [able] to do with themselves for the past 25 years, fired from their jobs with a conviction record??!
...
Dear MP's: Don't think you're doing the world a great favor. Unless that bill also compensates those victims for the equivalent loss of 25 years of the gainful employment and promotions / wage increases they would have gotten, if it weren't for being FIRED and THROWN IN JAIL.
I do not understand why a blanket law - which is an awkward precedent - is needed. Would it not have been easier to set up a special sitting of the appeal court ...
Case N
Appellant's barrister: We appeal
CPS barrister: We do not object, and therefore support the appeal
Judge: Appeal granted. Appellant is cleared of all charges. Next:
Case N+1
Appellant's barrister: We appeal
CPS barrister: We do not object, and therefore support the appeal
Judge: Appeal granted. Next:
and so on. Properly set up they ought to be able to do ten cases an hour, and even at just fifty per day they could exonerate the lot in three working weeks.
They've had years to do this but always put up barriers in the past that meant few managed to get anywhere, so the government has finally had to do something about it by removing the need to prove you were innocent. The big problem was that much of the proof being held by Horizon, so it is (and was) easy to stall the process in the hopes the cases would be dropped
Don't know if the CPS would get involved as it was the PO who were doing the prosecuting without having to go through the CPS
My understanding is that they don't want to accidentally pardon any 'real' criminals, despite how their malpractice has made it nearly impossible to tell who they are. This means essentially re-trying all 900ish convicted sub-postmasters ""fairly"", which is slow and miserable.
Personally I think the appropriate saying is "better that ten guilty people go free than jail one innocent", but as we've seen time and time again the Post office is really big on saving face, and that appears to mean proving that at least *some* of their prosecutions were correct.
Even if there might be a very small number who were guilty of something, how can a fair trial ever be possible now, given that the Horizon data (which would inevitably form a major part of the evidence) is known to be hopelessly unreliable?
The only sensible course of action is to overturn all the convictions based entirely or largely on Horizon data. And no-retrials.
Maybe. It's absolutely right that those who did no wrong should be exonerated and compensated but no one who did wrong deserves the "well done, you've gotten away with it, and here's a cash prize as well" the government is handing out.
It is reasonable to let the CPS not exonerate those they believe are guilty so long as they can prove their case in a new hearing and those not exonerated get additional compensation for that when they are exonerated.
There is no need to use a fucked up 'let the guilty go free' approach and set dangerous precedent simply for expediency, merely to get this monkey off Sunak's back.
"Maybe. It's absolutely right that those who did no wrong should be exonerated and compensated but no one who did wrong deserves the "well done, you've gotten away with it, and here's a cash prize as well" the government is handing out."
It's not a blanket exoneration. There were cases with other supporting evidence who will not be included, although I'd expect even those to challenge their convictions where the Horizon system played any part in the evidence against them. And for those where pretty much all the evidence was Horizon system based and are in the group to be exonerated, yes, some small number of them may actually have defrauded the system but the general feeling is the "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"[*] principle being applied is the lesser of the current set of evils, ie dragging it out potentially for years while every single case is gone over in detail again.
[*] and yes, I'm fully aware that the numbers should be reversed for the principle to make sense in this case as it seems reasonable to say the vast majority to be exonerated are the innocents.
There is no way that this could have been covered up and dragged out for so long without government collusion. So, what you are witnessing are desperate attempts at covering arses in both government and the Civil Service, as well as those at the PO and Fujitsu. They hope to drag it out for long enough that the general public forget or get weary of the story and then they will rapidly tie it up in a ribbon with a "nothing to see here" label on it. There is a long tradition of this and it's typical government cover up tactics. If it wasn't for Private Eye and a few others whom the establishment would love to get rid of we would never have heard of any of this.
That's very welcome for England, Wales, and NI, but what about the poor Scottish Sub-postmasters who were similarly wrongfully convicted, in their case by Scottish Government Lawyers.
I've a sickening feeling that Scots Law may uphold all the unsound convictions north of the border to save face for both the Legal System and the Scottish Government. Would be par for the course.
Is many DWP led convictions on behalf of the Post Office that aren't covered by this Bill.
It is disgusting and odious that those convicted by the "wrong" organization may have to wait years for this miscarriage of
justice to be corrected, and puts doubt in the democratic process itself.
To think that one man was allowed to give 'expert' testimony despite (a) not being a lawyer, and (b) being wrong because
manglement didn't give him access to the information and only cherry picked those marginal cases that agreed with the
party line so to speak.
In scientific circles this is known as 'Pseudoscience' and a sign of exceptionally poor judgement.
We The People demand that this be resolved and as soon as possible, even if it means that the outgoing PM
personally signs the Bill that HRL later grants Royal Assent to, so justice is done at last.
The question of the DWP keeping back crucial information from the public enquiry and other matters of note
needs to be itself examined, and perhaps their powers need to be restricted for public order reasons.
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