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That's exactly what this proposal addresses. Consider the paper they cite, in part, for the proposal: "It is a matter of surprise that important documentary re
by jcrawfordor 3y ago
That's exactly what this proposal addresses. Consider the paper they cite, in part, for the proposal:
"It is a matter of surprise that important documentary records, such as the Fujitsu Known Error Log (KEL), were disclosed only in response to a direction from the court and in the face of opposition by the Post Office." (https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240/5083 https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240/5083)
The proposal in this paper would require prosecution to disclose extant documents related to the reliability of the system. In the Horizon case, such documents existed, but were never disclosed, as current practices did not require the prosecution to do so.
- sidewndr46 3y agoOK, the original comment makes more sense now. Are prosecutors in the UK required to disclose both incriminating and exculpatory evidence to the defendant?
- chrisjj 3y agoYes.
- olliej 3y agoI believe so, but they have a notorious track record of not doing so. But from other articles it sounds like these prosecutions involved some kind of parallel legal system just for the mail? I think though that the issue that this saga hit is that the law was such that the computer “evidence” was presumptively correct so they tried to pretend any “bugs” they were aware of didn’t change that fact and so the existence of bugs was not “exculpatory” - obviously BS, but it seems like that was the core behaviour/belief of the post office. That put the victims in the position of having to disprove the accusation but the only “evidence” in the case was the presumptively true report from the buggy system. Ie the only evidence presented was a system that was buggy, but the victim could not get evidence the system was broken without first proving it was broken. Yay!