This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!
No one should share the role of prosecutor, jury and judge.
There were a (relatively) small number of prosecutions from the CPS as well, which suffered from the same problem: the Post Office investigators gave the same bad evidence, which they used to convince a jury to convict.
I don't see how separation of powers helps here. I'm sure if I looked, I'd find cases in the USA where the police and/or prosecutors told a pack of lies based on dodgy evidence to secure convictions of serious crimes, too.
It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors' - because fully independent prosecutors should be rejecting cases with dodgy evidence. The police can get a bit grumpy with CPS for being quite strict at times - but it holds them to work their next case properly.
The PO clearly managed to convince the CPS in a number of cases, but had they had to do that for all there would have been a lot less cases prosecuted in total, and I think there would have been questions about their system a lot sooner.
It might not have avoided the problem, but it would have been much needed additional oversight into what they were doing.
So the separation of powers isn’t a magic solution to the problem then.
The lie came from the fact they weren’t looking into their own evidence and realising something was up when they were prosecuting hundreds of sub-postmasters.
It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.
(More on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076)
Any private citizen or business in the UK has a right to prosecute crimes. It just costs a lot of money, so you can imagine how it's used (spoiler: large companies/wealthy individuals against poor people).
As I said in a related comment: if I looked hard enough, I imagine I'd also be able to find similar miscarriages of justice in the USA, too.
Whereas a generic prosecutor has a bunch of cases of reports from victims that are not related to them, and thus if a case is not sufficiently strong, they'd normally just pick another case where the evidence is strong. They also have the responsibility to independently review the evidence from victims and police. These procedural checks didn't apply in the post office cases.
The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
I know what they wrote.
> The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.
I pointed out the CPS itself also prosecuted cases based on the bad evidence provided to them, so the procedural checks also did nothing.
Do note that the fact that CPS prosecuted cases does not mean the CPS didn't throw out dubious cases. We only know the ones they did prosecute, but we don't know how many (if any) they did not prosecute. As I said, this is speculation.
I also speculate that if you send hundreds of fraud cases to the CPS they might be suspicious why the rate of criminal fraud among the post office workers is so high.
I agree there's no evidence that the "private" prosecutions made things worse, but it surely didn't help, and deprived the system of an opportunity (whether it would have been taken or not) to prevent the miscarriages in the first place.
Clearly you do not, as I made no complaint; but merely pointed out how it wasn't quite the regular court process that tomalpha said it to be, and pointed out another thing that has been highlighted by the case. As it has been. A lot more people know this about Post Office Ltd than used to, and it is oft-discussed when the subject comes up.
More on which, again, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076. And more on the expected consequences of this coming to widespread public attention, and another private organization that is a prolific private prosecutor, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969548.
Historically, all prosecutions were private, and later, the police who investigated them carried them out.
Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed
by the state-owned Post Office service were accused of
fraud, theft or malicious accounting.
Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230
were jailed.
Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they
were accused of fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies,
marriage failures, substance abuse and even suicides.
There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all
of those people were innocent
Doesnt the UK have independent non-political bodies that watch the watchers? What about protections for whistleblowers who call these things out?
Frankly that sounds Banana-Republic-ish and not something you would find in a first-rate advanced economy.
[1] Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/inside-the-incr...
The royal mail had all sorts of powers, historically, as it was a royally sanctioned monopoly, with a charter. The process of privatization left some odd conventions around, such as that it was normal for Post Office Ltd to prosecute things privately, when this has been exceptional for most other entities.
The Post Office used to prosecute for television licence offences, for example, and that only went away relatively recently compared to some of its historic powers. Historically, it had a monopoly over telephones and telegraphy, and some of the powers that the Post Office had in the 19th century were things like compulsory purchase of anyone running private telephone or telegraph systems or prosecuting people for traffic offences on the highway just because there was a mail coach involved.
The Post Office Act 1953 granted the Postmaster General some very sweeping powers, and set the bar quite low for proving fraud against the Post Office: basically, the Postmaster General's say-so for some elements. The Postmaster General also had to give consent to all prosecutions of offences against the Post Office, effectively putting prosecutorial discretion in the hands of the Post Office. And the Postmaster General also had the power to collect the fines upon conviction.
And that's part of how we ended up with the situation at the start of the 21st century.
The idea that you need a license to own a television and receive broadcasts in the UK and that the government actively prosecutes people who watch TV without a license always boggled my mind. Surely there is a more economically efficient and less absurd way to fund the BBC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.
The Crown Prosecution Service can take over any prosecution at the discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, but they didn't seem to know (and/or care) what the Post Office were doing.
Isn't this very similar to how the United States Postal Inspection Service works? (although I think they don't prosecute themselves, but refer matters to the prosecution.)
I heard they are quite formidable and not to be trifled with.
The UK justice system is not fit for purpose - unless the purpose is to let the upper classes get away with (almost literal) murder.
In Law and Order: Postal Inspectors Jerry Orbach is a Postal Inspector, Sam Waterston is the Federal Attorney, and the closest boss who intersects in their respective lines of authority is literally the President of the United States.
Consider that in Scotland, private prosecutions are much rarer and are only permitted in certain circumstances. The post office could not and did not do private prosecutions in Scotland. So, as a result, do we observe lower rates of prosecutions in Scotland than in the wider UK? Nope!
In fact, in Scotland there were 100 convictions, vs 700 in the UK as a whole. The conviction rate per capita, and hence injustice rate, was actually higher in the part of the UK doing public prosecutions, than in the part of the UK doing private prosecutions. Not exactly a vote of confidence.