[thmsths]

What I can't comprehend is the scale of the failure of the justice system here. Unless I am mistaken there were hundreds of victims over more than a decade. So 700 trials, in which the judges and the juries failed these people. How can such a systemic failure happen? It paints a very poor picture of the justice system in the UK ...

[fauigerzigerk]

It's because Post Office bosses failed to disclose the facts. This was/is a systematic cover-up. What I don't understand is why the people responsible for this, such as then CEO Paula Vennells, do not face criminal charges.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/18/post-o...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/23/post-office...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells

[zzbn00]

This is the key. The prosecutions were all "private prosecutions" by the post office, in which a private entity begins (and sometimes carries through to end) a prosecution _on behalf of the people_.

There is an enormous amount of incredible litigation behaviour by the post office in this case. The problem for them is: it all came to trial in the end and its there for everyone to read in painful detail.

Here is, for example, the post office trying to remove the judge in the case after it all started unraveling:

https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/871.html

And in 929 of https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/3408.html the Judge writes of Post office senior officers refusal to accept to flaws of Horizon even very late in the game:

"This approach by the Post Office has amounted, in reality, to bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred, at least so far as the witnesses called before me in the Horizon Issues trial are concerned. It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat. "

[fauigerzigerk]

>This is the key. The prosecutions were all "private prosecutions" by the post office, in which a private entity begins (and sometimes carries through to end) a prosecution _on behalf of the people_.

And to top it all off, this particular "private entity" is state owned.

[15457345234]

What I don't understand is why a drop-in CEO decides to go to bat so relentlessly for a system that they didn't select and a vendor they have no prior connection to.

It's the sort of thing you'd expect from the chairman of a 15 generation family company, not some walk-in recruitee.

[Daviey]

The thing that confuses me... where did the supposedly lost money go? From my very basic understanding, the computer system said there was a gap in accounting, so it was assumed to be the operator that took it. There must have been millions of £ in "lost" money, but actual accounts couldn't have shown the loss, because there wasn't. Were these convictions purely based on the data from a computer system, with no forensics accounts of the theft or where the proceeds ended up?

[15457345234]

From reading the trial notes listed below I'd genuinely be astonished if they could answer that question. The 3rd line support staff (!!!) were literally inserting records into the database to balance transactions (!!!) using the command line client and stored procedures. Also, they were doing that based on their own understanding of the issue which had occurred and the action that needed to be taken to remedy the issue, and the records that were being inserted were indistinguishable from 'conventionally entered' transactions. In addition, some other level of staff - it seems like yet another layer of DBAs - had root on the database with no audit trail beyond logon/logoff.

The sheer number of routine failures that appear to have been accepted as part of the normal operation of the system is astonishing.

[benj111]

My current theory is that the 'justice' system is set up basically to punish a 'criminal' class, often overlapping with the lower class.

The middle and upper class don't really have much interaction, they just fondly imagine that the justice system upholds the values it espouses.

The 'criminal' class aren't so much identified by a fair trial, or evidence, but by what sounds about right.

This system may work well for moving actual criminals through the sausage factory, but falls down spectacularly in cases like this, where the 'obvious' or most likely gut feeling isn't correct.