[tomalpha]

This was a regular court process, with an independent judge and jury. It’s just the prosecution was run directly by the post office and not the public prosecutor.

It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.

[JdeBP]

It's not quite regular. Normally, the (purported) victim and the prosecutor are not the same person. That's another thing that has been highlighted by this case: the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself, rather than them being prosecuted independently by the Crown Prosecution Service.

(More on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076)

[saulr]

> the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself

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).

[mnw21cam]

The Crown Prosecution Service also has the power to take over a case that is being prosecuted privately, and if they decide to take no further action on it, then the person/company that was doing the private prosecution no longer can.

[JdeBP]

You should have read the more-on-which first. (-:

[scott_w]

The CPS also "successfully" prosecuted some cases based on the same evidence. If your key complainants are fabricating evidence that looks solid to a jury, separation of powers is not going to save you from the power of the state.

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.

[hnfong]

The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

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.

[scott_w]

> The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

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.

[hnfong]

I think we're basically on the same page, diverging only on speculative items.

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.

[scott_w]

Honestly, the fact the Post Office were marking their own homework almost certainly made everything worse, in my opinion. I’m just taking issue with the idea that it was the sole cause, as we similar things happen under different systems, too.

[JdeBP]

> I know what they wrote.

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.

[JdeBP]

Post Office Ltd is not "the state". At least nominally. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century. As I just said, one of the things that this has highlighted for people is that a private company has a normal practice of pursuing criminal prosecutions (for fraud in this case) privately, rather than via the Crown Prosecution Service which is normal practice for almost every other private company or organization when it comes to criminal matters.

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.

[scott_w]

You’re correct, it’s not any more. I’m saying it used to be ;-)