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Not to excuse the post office or the UK legal system-- but there are reasons your point has limitations. The subpostmasters were signing statements that their

by nullc 3y ago

Not to excuse the post office or the UK legal system-- but there are reasons your point has limitations. The subpostmasters were signing statements that their accounts were accurate, their charges were mostly related to these sorts of collateral lies rather than the theft. So in a uselessly pedantic and literal sense they often had performed the wrongful act they were accused of, though this ignores that they were more or less forced into it and sometimes explicitly told by tech support to do so. In specific cases the financially disabled and often unrepresented subpostmasters made legal errors. For example, instead of defending themselves by responding that the Horizon figures were inaccurate they defended themselves by saying they could prove they didn't take the funds from their own books. Essentially allowing the burden of proof to be reversed.

jmyeet 3y ago
None of that is incompatible with what my comment. So subpostmasters signed affidavits to the accuracy of their accounts. The burden of proof should still be on the government to substantiate that those claims are false and there is material harm and not, for example, just a bookkeeping error. Particularly when a system is new, we all know that it has to be verified. For migrations that typically means comparing the results to the old system and then manually looking at discrepancies. In the case of a new system, it should be the bare minimum standard that before a person is accused of a crime, the system is verified, in this case by human review, probably by an auditor or financial accounting firm. The crime being the false affidavit (even here you have the government has the burden of proof to show it was knowingly false) rather than any alleged theft is pure theater and a cop out. Like you sign a statement saying you didn't steal money and I charge you with lying. Shouldn't I have to prove you were lying? Isn't that basically the same as proving the theft occurred? If subpostmasters can be charged and/or sued for making false statements by a computer system, why can't someone be charged for the false statements that computer system made?
- ali1234 3y ago
  No, you've not understood what happened. The SPMs were forced to sign and take responsibility for accounts that were prepared by the Horizon system, which claimed the SPMs owed the Post Office tens of thousands of pounds of imaginary money. If they later claimed that the accounts were wrong (which they were), they'd be prosecuted for signing them, and if they didn't do that they would be prosecuted for not paying the PO the money they supposedly owed. So they would lose either way, and the actual accuracy of the accounts was never tested in court, because in any individual case the PO did not disagree with the SPM about that. The point being that this can't be blamed on software bugs alone. It was caused by different departments of the PO having completely contradictory ideas about how the software was supposed to work.
- nullc 3y ago
  I think you have it backwards, they signed statements saying the system generated false accounts were accurate. In some cases they did so after putting in manual adjustments to diminish the debts which themselves were not accurate (they had the right moral effect, but they were literally false accounting records-- correct accounting would have required finding and adjusting the actual errors made by Horizon, which they did not and likely could not do). At best they were in a weird catch-22 where disputing the records is an admission that they knowingly filed false accounts (itself a crime, regardless of they funds owed or not), and at worst they indisputably entered false accounting records (though for understandable reasons and sometimes at the direction of tech support staff). Part of the reason justice was possible at all was because Alan Bates simply refused to sign the false reports. He got shut down and suffered tremendous hardship as a result, but he wasn't litigated against-- which left him in a position to drive forward justice. ... and even that required whistle blowers and leaks to force the disclosure of documents that were wrongfully being concealed. I can't emphasize enough that I'm not saying any of this to attribute fault to the subpostmasters or deflect it away from the post office or Fujitsu. I don't think it does. But I think it's important to have a more comprehensive understanding of what went wrong so as to understand how situations like this can be prevented. To that end understanding how the situation made some of the subpostmasters guilty (or at least in violation of their contract) in narrow a technical sense is important, because it highlights how the judiciary and its duty bound actors (the solicitors, barristers, and independent experts) operated in a -- for lack a better word-- autistic and rule bound way that yielded results which were completely incompatible with justice.

by nullc 3y ago

jmyeet 3y ago

None of that is incompatible with what my comment. So subpostmasters signed affidavits to the accuracy of their accounts. The burden of proof should still be on the government to substantiate that those claims are false and there is material harm and not, for example, just a bookkeeping error. Particularly when a system is new, we all know that it has to be verified. For migrations that typically means comparing the results to the old system and then manually looking at discrepancies. In the case of a new system, it should be the bare minimum standard that before a person is accused of a crime, the system is verified, in this case by human review, probably by an auditor or financial accounting firm. The crime being the false affidavit (even here you have the government has the burden of proof to show it was knowingly false) rather than any alleged theft is pure theater and a cop out. Like you sign a statement saying you didn't steal money and I charge you with lying. Shouldn't I have to prove you were lying? Isn't that basically the same as proving the theft occurred? If subpostmasters can be charged and/or sued for making false statements by a computer system, why can't someone be charged for the false statements that computer system made?

ali1234 3y ago
No, you've not understood what happened. The SPMs were forced to sign and take responsibility for accounts that were prepared by the Horizon system, which claimed the SPMs owed the Post Office tens of thousands of pounds of imaginary money. If they later claimed that the accounts were wrong (which they were), they'd be prosecuted for signing them, and if they didn't do that they would be prosecuted for not paying the PO the money they supposedly owed. So they would lose either way, and the actual accuracy of the accounts was never tested in court, because in any individual case the PO did not disagree with the SPM about that. The point being that this can't be blamed on software bugs alone. It was caused by different departments of the PO having completely contradictory ideas about how the software was supposed to work.
nullc 3y ago
I think you have it backwards, they signed statements saying the system generated false accounts were accurate. In some cases they did so after putting in manual adjustments to diminish the debts which themselves were not accurate (they had the right moral effect, but they were literally false accounting records-- correct accounting would have required finding and adjusting the actual errors made by Horizon, which they did not and likely could not do). At best they were in a weird catch-22 where disputing the records is an admission that they knowingly filed false accounts (itself a crime, regardless of they funds owed or not), and at worst they indisputably entered false accounting records (though for understandable reasons and sometimes at the direction of tech support staff). Part of the reason justice was possible at all was because Alan Bates simply refused to sign the false reports. He got shut down and suffered tremendous hardship as a result, but he wasn't litigated against-- which left him in a position to drive forward justice. ... and even that required whistle blowers and leaks to force the disclosure of documents that were wrongfully being concealed. I can't emphasize enough that I'm not saying any of this to attribute fault to the subpostmasters or deflect it away from the post office or Fujitsu. I don't think it does. But I think it's important to have a more comprehensive understanding of what went wrong so as to understand how situations like this can be prevented. To that end understanding how the situation made some of the subpostmasters guilty (or at least in violation of their contract) in narrow a technical sense is important, because it highlights how the judiciary and its duty bound actors (the solicitors, barristers, and independent experts) operated in a -- for lack a better word-- autistic and rule bound way that yielded results which were completely incompatible with justice.