UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

Re:UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corru... by londons_explore on Friday April 23, 2021 @10:42AM (#26915225)

Presumably to put someone in prison for being a money thief, one would need to prove where that money went...

Were all these people accused of theft with not a single record of the yachts they bought with all the money they supposedly stole?

I would assume most of these people would be able to turn over a complete financial record of their lives (ie. I was paid £x, I paid taxes of £y, and here is a bank statement showing how I spent it, and here is whats leftover). How exactly can you imprison someone for theft of money if they can present that?

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Re:UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corru... by zinok on Friday April 23, 2021 @10:50AM (#26915291)

Post Offices handle a large amount of cash, much more than any other business of their size. Many of the sub-post offices in question would be paying out pensions and welfare benefits in cash to a large proportion of local customers. If someone was stealing from the post office, they could easily do so in cash.

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Re:UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corru... by ClumsyPilot on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:39PM (#26917158)

So 500 peiple stole millions and the prosecution cannot show where a single penny went, noone even got a new car or TV? Did they eat the money?

And all the evodence the prosecution has are electronic records, entirely in their control, which they could fake and which were never checked by a third party for basic errors? This is a colossal miscarriage of justice

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Re:UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corru... by lupire on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:11PM (#26916857)

It's hard to spend $70K in cash, though.

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Re:UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corru... by zinok on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:57PM (#26917345)

Perhaps it is, but if there had been credible evidence of a theft 'I would not have been able to spend all that money in cash' is not the basis of a solid defense.

There have been genuine cases where accountants, bank managers, and so on have embezzled large sums of money, including in cash, and spent it all untraceably on things like feeding a gambling addiction.

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