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Post Office scandal victims in Scotland have convictions quashed
- andylynch 2y agoGood. Now, when are they getting compensation, and where are the indictments for Post Office’s senior management?
- konha 2y agoFrom the article: > Emergency legislation to exonerate wrongfully convicted Post Office workers has completed its journey through Scottish Parliament and each will now receive initial compensation of £600,000, with the ability to claim more as financial redress for their suffering.
- ziggy_star 2y agoWell, considering this started in the year 2000 most of that management is probably dead or will be by the time the process concludes.
- andylynch 2y agoYes, bearing in mind too that Crown Court trials are now often scheduled 2 years out, quite possibly.
- ziggy_star 2y ago[flagged]
- janice1999 2y agoThe leaders at the time are very much alive: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67925304 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67925304
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- seanhunter 2y agoFor people unaware I'll give a quick summary. The post office in the UK has always relied on an extensive network of "subpostmasters" to run local branches. These are often people who run small businesses or shops and add basic postal services such as delivering packages, selling stamps etc to an existing shop. This is especially important as a service in small towns etc. In 1999 the government brought in Fujitsu as an IT provider and insisted these subpostmasters adopt a fujitsu-developed accounting system called "Horizon" to account for the postal activities of these shops. They then (relentlessly) investigated and prosecuted an extraordinary number of these people for fraud based on the outputs of this system, which turned out to have been reporting incorrectly based of software bugs. This was covered up. About 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted for fraud and theft and over a hundred sent to prison even though as far as I am aware there is literally no evidence other than horizon of any wrongdoing by any of them. The facts are finally emerging and justice is starting to be done although the perpetrators of the malicious prosecutions and the coverup have so far got off and victims have still not received compensation. Here is a slightly more extensive summary https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s...
- Loughla 2y agoThis says they'll get compensation, so that's good. But somebody needs to go to jail for covering this up. A lot of somebody's probably.
- alistairSH 2y agoYeah, I really hope some higher-ups at both the national postal service and Fujistu go to jail over this. And how the hell did the post office come to believe 700+ sub-post-masters were committing fraud? It strikes me as patently ridiculous that such a large number of people would be doing similar small-time accounting fraud. Nobody thought "huh, might be the systems?"
- JusticeJuice 2y agoA lot of people who aren't software developers have blind faith that software is always correct. Inversely, software developers never trust software to be correct.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rapzid 2y agoIt should have been a huge red flag to have that many people from a very specific segment of society, sub-postmasters, convicted of the same crime. Regardless of pleading guilty or not, the idea of that many sub-postmasters committing the same crime is so absurd it should have kicked off internal investigations at the Ministry of Justic and post.