Of course, the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) has always had the right to take over and discontinue a private prosecution.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/28/rspca-plans-to...
I said this is just like if the police where investigating your for murder and I was told ah well in the bad old days people used to fall down stairs on occasion
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
Oh, and also the bit about spending 2 decades covering everything up and trying to clamp down on the investigation rather than admitting you got it wrong, once again at the expense the subpostmasters..
We do the same thing with breathalyzers in most of the US. No independent people allowed to inspect the system for bugs.
The trouble is that if you speak up about it, people ask: "why are you defending drunk drivers?" It's like innocent until proven guilty flies out the window.
But hey, I'm just a stupid peon, so what do I know.
Here's another dangerous idea: the justice system has false positive rates.
A judgement is a test with two possible results: innocent or guilty. Every test has false positives and false negativies. For every judge, there is a chance they'll condemn the innocent or absolve the guilty. How likely is it? We'll never know.
From my personal experience, it seemed like everyone I dealt with who was part if the system was either incompetent, made mistakes, or might have even been covering things up. The trooper I already mentioned. The corporal investigating him said the trooper's lie was just a misunderstanding, but offered no reasoning or evidence to support that. He also overlooked some other things that were violations of policy (they only cited him for one reg when he fit several). The Sargent who approved the citation said he couldn't do anything about it even if it's incorrect, which is wrong because he can take action based on what the LT told me later. The LT investigated a follow up complaint (the trooper never took the corrective actions listed in first complaint). He didn't follow the correct complaint procedures since he closed the complaint without any notes or findings. I had to call IA, then I assume IA called him since the LT called me a day or two later. He can't even answer basic questions like what laws he used to determine the rules of criminal procedure weren't broken and if he investigated the trooper's conduct as prosecutorial misconduct since he acted as the prosecution and knowingly held an incorrect charge and made several misstatements in court (that we have evidence for). The first magistrate we got gave a continuance. He was arrested on unrelated charges. The second magistrate gave another continuance and thought that we were calling him prejudice when asking to dismiss with prejudice (most magistrates in my state are not lawyers). The third magistrate was a retired police cheif who showed bias, wouldn't let us present a motion, misapplied the law, and was yelling at us to the point his face turned red and he was not understandable due to a lack of air. The ADA originally assigned to the case had an email complaint and the information to confirm that the trooper knew this was an incorrect charge and that the citation didn't even claim the elements of the offense were met, yet they took no action and allowed us to be subjected to those pretrial restrictions. At the appeal, the new ADA tried to misapply the law, with some success. They also told the court administrator/scheduling not to talk to us and not to accommodate any of our witnesses without their approval, which normal for other types of cases with standard discovery procedures, but those don't apply here. The judge actually contradicted his himself in some of his reasons for his determinations - at one point saying a trial de novo is a complete do-over so he won't allow any record from that trial to be used and later saying you would need a record of the previous trial in order to have the charge dismissed. He then misapplied the law and would not even look at, or accept as evidence, an official letter from a state agency that helps define an ambiguous term in the law, which would show us to be in compliance with the law. Even without the letter, the principle of lenity and the rules of statutory construction were blatantly ignored. There were also some paperwork and administrative mishaps, like some information not being recorded and later spending 30 minutes on a moot motion, or the court refusing to provide us with the amended citation with the new charge because "we don't have anything to give you" eventhough it's in the file. The other party was in violation of two similar laws the this one, yet the trooper and DA office decided not to investigate/prosecute even when she admitted being in violation for one offense. So much for the law applying equally.
So yeah, in my view the system has no integrity and is severely broken. I have little faith in justice actually being carried out. I guarantee many people have been convicted who were innocent. I think it's mostly due to the fact that innocent until proven guilty doesn't exist anymore.
Honestly, this is now the public perception (and the system) operates these days. I had a trooper recently hold a charge that he knew was incorrect and it carried with it pretrial restrictions that no other charge would. The state police say there's nothing wrong with subjecting people to pretrial restrictions under charges that they know to be incorrect. The attitude is "screw you, criminal" (just a summary offense).
Some states actually get it right and use blood tests. That means that some blood is saved if the defense wants to have it tested (evidence preservation).
Once upon a time, computer programming attempted to be a profession. Fortunately for all of us who write code for a living, we no longer have to live under the threat of that responsibility.
Computer says no = okay it’s your fault.
It’s the equivalent of ‘works on my local’ so get lost you deal with it.
Computers may be binary but the people who make them aren’t.
This failing of understanding and with the advent of easy ML will only add to the problem.
Askimov’s multivac would end the human race before it helped it.
Applications are starting to get to the point of dogma for many of us at a certain level.
Still love the film ‘Idiocracy’ becoming more and more prescient.
Part of which was caused the very "antagonistic" IB or SD like the US postal Inspectors.
There was a bit guilty by suspicion tendency that went on and I suspect some of this culture was embedded in the organisation.
Certainly having yourself or your staff investigated by SD was considered very stressful even after the "bad old days"
BT = British Telecom. British telco, which used to be part of the government-owned Post Office, but was separated from it in 1981 and then privatised in 1984. The delivery services part of the Post Office (Royal Mail) was separately privatised in 2013; but the retail post office business (Post Office Ltd) remains under full government ownership, albeit most of the individual post offices are privately run by franchisees – and it was these franchisees who were being prosecuted
IB = Investigation Branch – https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/the-post-office-investigat...
SD = Security Division
Blame whoever signed off on the system. Can't fix bugs that aren't reported.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/05/11/breathalyzer-source...
https://lawreader.com/?p=12801
https://www.tradesecretslaw.com/2008/02/articles/practice-pr...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/buggy-breathalyz...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
The security photo is directly viewable by the police and the accused.
No doubt it's some sprawling, insane Java monstrosity Manhattan project or suchlike.
"Yeah - 10,000 classes - completely fine and not crazy at all."
If their system were up to date, written in a safe language, has unit tests and an independant review said it was solid, then it is just one acceptable piece of evidence.
What i dont get is - where was the money? Supposedly hundreds of people stoke huge amount of money, and none of them had it in a bank, bought a new car, or showed any signs of suddenly becoming wealthier. Where did the judge think the money go to, they ate it? How was this not suspicious?
I personally think this is partly down to the fact people don't get state defence lawyers anymore in the uk. You could accuse me of fraud with zero evidence and I likely would have to plead guilty as I don't have 20k for the down payment for a lawyer...
What a shit storm. Now watch as nothing changes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
We should consider the cost of QA and of engineering process against the cost to these 39 people of their freedom and a large part of their lives due to an accounting error in the software.
The places where you do see formal-methods would be in, for example, FADEC for aircraft engines, or an operating system process scheduler.
As it is, I don't know what part of the system is responsible for reporting money stolen by postmasters - the BBC News article is light on technical details. The Register has more details: https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/23/post_office_scandal_f... as does this website focused entirely on the trial: https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019_03_25_archive.html
The bugs are described as being part of the systems' payments processing system (as the Post Office does function as a financial institution, after-all) - but that at least some of the bugs were caused by ad-hoc work on the system (wot, no CI/CD to gatekeep releases?!) so I'm thinking this is just institutional incompetence - let alone a lack of software-engineering processes - so the idea of them implementing formal-methods for proving the system's correctness is laughable.
[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
Imagine not doing inspections of new building construction because it would be costly.
No, the problem is greater than that. Decisions that affect people should not be made solely by computers or algorithms, and those decisions should be made transparent and auditable. If that leads to different/better ways of writing software, good. It's a larger societal issue though.
I think there's a lot of room for writing software better, including expanded source access for public systems and formal verification when critical.
But the failure in this case isn't technical, it's legal. It's rational to decide that occasional bugs in a mail software system are acceptable, and not worth the cost of designing a system's development around formal-verification. What's obviously insane is treating such a system as if it's bug-free beyond a reasonable doubt, and ruining innocent people's lives over it.
There are a lot of forms of gross incompetence and negligence that we're all fine with because they're so common. Failing to reason about software systems and their pitfalls, or consult with those who are capable of doing so, is an extremely-common and often-dangerous example (cf dumbass Senators grilling Zuckerberg with their 1970s understanding of how technology functions).
The blame here lies squarely on the prosecutors, judges, etc who are responsible for these verdicts. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Q) Did you or any of the people you got to examine the software found any way that what the defendents said was true?
A) No
Q) Then you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
I think the bigger issue here is around the power that a large organisation wields to duck and dive and use corporate tricks to manipulate how it played out. For example, the fact that so many people had been accused could have been analyzed if it was known e.g. Last year 5 convictions, this year, 700!
If you're going to convict someone of stealing £59,000, the very first thing you should have to show is that £59,000 actually got stolen. If there is reasonable doubt that the crime took place, no one can be guilty beyond that reasonable doubt. If the defendant claims the computer system got it wrong, it's not enough to say you are unaware of bugs, the prosecution should have to show that the computer's output was consistent with the results of doing the calculation by another method.
Can only speak for English and Welsh law, but this isn't accurate. Theft is prosecuted under the Theft Act 1968 and does not require the accused to actually receive the goods or money stolen. All the accused need do to "appropriate" property is assume the rights of the owner e.g, if the accused had access to someone's bank account and they sent money to a third-party, that's still theft because they assumed the rights of the owner (to transfer the money) even though the money didn't go to the accused themselves.
Yes, if they could have proved they also received what was stolen, that would have been a slam dunk but there are enough plausible reasons why they can't find the money. Maybe it was given to friends and family as cash, maybe it was used to gamble or to pay off some criminal.
It isn't much different than somebody saying, "you did it because we found your DNA". The Courts or Jury are inclined to believe it because "science" and if the defence are not on their game enough to show how "because DNA" is not always watertight, the defendent is seen as guilty beyond reasonbale doubt.
No, it claimed that what they had sold didn't tally, a claim they never proved. The defense put forward another plausible explanation - that the software was incorrect, and the prosecution obviously didn't prove the software was accurate.
Even if the computer was right and there was a genuine discrepancy in the tally, you then need to prove that this person was the one responsible for it. Certainly in this case, there couldn't possibly have been sufficient evidence to prove they were the ones that did it if it was never done to begin with. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it sure as hell isn't proof of presence.
In the "we found your DNA" analogy, you're finding my DNA in my workplace where nothing has actually gone missing - how does that prove I am guilty of theft?
If this was one or two cases, then sure, maybe they were really smart about hiding the money. However, there were hundreds of convictions. What is the more likely explanation?
Post office looses packages all the time, should someone go to jail for that too?
If their stuff doesn't tally, they are disorganised, they loose stuff or have idiots. Thats their problem. Maybe it's post office employees stealing shit.
Why do we immediately assume postmasters have abything to do with it without a shred of evidence?
There is a strange presumption in here. It is true that lack of evidence doesn't always means there's evidence that there was no crime. But that shouldn't matter. A crime should only be prosecutable if it is demonstrable. We shouldn't say "oh, well the prosecution had a really hard case, we should just convict this person anyway because it wasn't fair to those lawyers." That's such a perverse way of reasoning about it.
It's like a murderer giving evidence against a random stranger and being believed at face value because they provided all the evidence first hand.