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Largest ever miscarriage of justice?

Garrison said:
So some years back the Post Office in the UK installed a new computer system and lo and behold the system revealed a large number of cases of what looked like theft and embezzlement. The accused insisted the computer system was at fault, the Post Office insisted it was perfect and many people were bankrupted, disgraced, convicted and in some cases imprisoned.

What comes next is all too predictable, evidence emerges that the Post Office knew the system was flawed, the post office was sued and forced to payout compensation to those who lost livelihoods. Today it was the turn of those convicted in court and in a single day 39 people had their convictions quashed:

Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared
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Ah yes, the Horizon debacle.
Over six hundred people, mainly postmasters/mistresses were effected, harassed, persecuted, falsely prosecuted (and privately) et cetera. They were accused and convicted, some died, all because of an unwillingness to admit a computer system was unfit for purpose.
Boycott Fujitsu.
 
Lothian said:
Not sure if it is the largest ever. However my parents were caught up in it
They had a sub post office. Mother was an ex maths teacher. She never had issues until the new system came in and there stated to be discrepancies with the weekly balance. Often they had to put their own money in to make up the shortfall. I guess those in court and prison were the ones who refused to do that.
In the end they just shut the doors and closed the post office down. It is unfortunately too late for them to share the good news but speaking to others in their network at the time they all knew it was the system that was flawed.
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Some of the people imprisoned started off by doing that, but the sums involved became too great for them to keep up. One couple actually remortgaged their house in an effort to plug the shortfall but it kept growing and they couldn't meet it.
 
theprestige said:
Heh. No system is perfect. The courts must render judgement without necessarily knowing all the facts. In many cases, important facts are unknowable, or undiscoverable at the time. Is it fair to say that justice has miscarried, if the rule of law is followed and the standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" is met?

Now, if a corrupt prosecutor railroads the accused, or an incompetent defense counsel fails to do their job, I'd call that a miscarriage of justice.

If a cop gives a brother cop a break on some infraction, that's a miscarriage of justice.

If prison guards arrange or allow extrajudicial punishment of prisoners under their care, that's a miscarriage of justice.

But in most cases, where rule of law was followed, but later the judgement is overturned on a technicality or because of new evidence, I would not say there was a miscarriage of justice. The information in the OP is not enough for me to determine whether justice actually miscarried in that case.

I'm not even sure that justice miscarried in California vs OJ Simpson.
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If one or more witnesses have lied to the court in order to secure the convictions, this is a miscarriage of justice within the meaning of the term.

You might quibble the point if the "new evidence" was genuinely new and not known to anyone at the time of the original trial, but in this case we have multiple witnesses perjuring themselves.
 
Fujitsu saying it's nothing to do with them, they just provided the software, they were not party to the prosecution's.
 
Comparison with Tulia, Texas

When I saw the number 39 in the opening post, I thought that this is similar to the number who were falsely charged in Tulia, Texas, which was 39.* Further reading in this thread makes it sound as if many more were caught up in the present miscarriage than in Tulia. Astonishing.
EDT
38 is what I meant to type, although 47 is a better estimate, overall. That is still an order of magnitude below the present case.
 
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Today on Radio 4 there was a phone in from a software engineer involved as an expert witness for the defence in one of the early prosecutions.
He says the case was dropped when his report was presented.
 
Rolfe said:
If one or more witnesses have lied to the court in order to secure the convictions, this is a miscarriage of justice within the meaning of the term.

You might quibble the point if the "new evidence" was genuinely new and not known to anyone at the time of the original trial, but in this case we have multiple witnesses perjuring themselves.
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I'm not sure about witnesses, mainly because I'm not sure about defendants.

For example: Say a murderer is charged with murder. He pleads not guilty. The state is unable to justify taking away his freedom, because it cannot prove the charge to the standard required by the rule of law. The defense did nothing underhanded. The prosecutor was neither incompetent nor corrupt. The murderer simply covered their tracks too well, and the evidence necessary to convict just isn't there. The murderer goes free.

I would say there is no miscarriage of justice here, even though the defendant lied about what they'd done. On the other hand, if the prosecutor, knowing the defendant was guilty, manufactured evidence to secure a conviction, I would absolutely call that a miscarriage of justice.

I'm not sure exactly how far this principle should extend, but I think it probably should extend at least far enough to cover defendants who decide not to make incriminating admissions - including defendants who commit perjury rather than incriminate themselves.

I think any pragmatic, practical justice system in the real world has to be able to get by without the full cooperation of the accused. Therefore, acquittals of guilty people because they did not cooperate with their own conviction aren't miscarriages of justice. They are simply the justice system doing what it's supposed to do, the way it's supposed to do it. The system carried its burden properly to its properly lawful conclusion. It did not miscarry anything.
 
Nessie said:
I am not sure. I am also not sure how many, if any Post Office cases are from Scotland.

In Scotland there is no specific criminal offence to fail to disclose evidence, instead there is a Lord Advocate's Code of Practice. Since it is regularly the prosecutor who fails to disclose evidence, or ensure that potentially exculpatory evidence is investigated, and the Lord Advocate is head prosecutor, it is unlikely the prosecutor is going to prosecute themselves.

The legal system considers itself to be honourable, whilst repeatedly proving it is not. Like the banking system, which asked for a light regulatory touch because it could be trusted, and then instantly embarked on a series of financial scandals mis-selling products. Another example are MPs, who hate being held to account, but constantly prove that they need strict regulation of their behaviour.

It is legalised corruption, the fantasy whereby we pretend not to be corrupt, by making corrupt practices leagl, or at least not illegal.
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I think some of them were from Scotland. I know that our local postmaster was involved in the campaign to achieve these acquittals, I've seen his photo attached to some earler articles about the case.
 
theprestige said:
I'm not sure about witnesses, mainly because I'm not sure about defendants.

For example: Say a murderer is charged with murder. He pleads not guilty. The state is unable to justify taking away his freedom, because it cannot prove the charge to the standard required by the rule of law. The defense did nothing underhanded. The prosecutor was neither incompetent nor corrupt. The murderer simply covered their tracks too well, and the evidence necessary to convict just isn't there. The murderer goes free.

I would say there is no miscarriage of justice here, even though the defendant lied about what they'd done. On the other hand, if the prosecutor, knowing the defendant was guilty, manufactured evidence to secure a conviction, I would absolutely call that a miscarriage of justice.

I'm not sure exactly how far this principle should extend, but I think it probably should extend at least far enough to cover defendants who decide not to make incriminating admissions - including defendants who commit perjury rather than incriminate themselves.

I think any pragmatic, practical justice system in the real world has to be able to get by without the full cooperation of the accused. Therefore, acquittals of guilty people because they did not cooperate with their own conviction aren't miscarriages of justice. They are simply the justice system doing what it's supposed to do, the way it's supposed to do it. The system carried its burden properly to its properly lawful conclusion. It did not miscarry anything.
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Tell you what, read the article Vixen linked to.

The justice system is set up, allegedly, to err on the side of acquitting the factually guilty, if the case against them cannot be made beyond reasonable doubt. So factually guilty people getting away with it because the case against them wasn't strong enough in court isn't a miscarriage of justice because that's how it's supposed to work.

On the other hand perjuring prosecution witnesses are one of the commonest causes of miscarriages of justice, that is the conviction of the innocent, because that's what's not supposed to happen.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
When I saw the number 39 in the opening post, I thought that this is similar to the number who were falsely charged in Tulia, Texas, which was 39. Further reading in this thread makes it sound as if many more were caught up in the present miscarriage than in Tulia. Astonishing.
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The Private Eye investigation says 555, and I'm not even sure that was all of them.

I saw a tweet earlier today from someone who had a relative commit suicide because of it.
 
Rolfe said:
I think some of them were from Scotland. I know that our local postmaster was involved in the campaign to achieve these acquittals, I've seen his photo attached to some earler articles about the case.
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How did the press, broadly speaking, cover these cases at the time? Did they just swallow the government's account, or did they do their own investigations? In the U.S., the notion that hundreds of postmasters across the country suddenly turned crooked would have spurred quite a lot of interest.
 
Bob001 said:
How did the press, broadly speaking, cover these cases at the time? Did they just swallow the government's account, or did they do their own investigations? In the U.S., the notion that hundreds of postmasters across the country suddenly turned crooked would have spurred quite a lot of interest.
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There was no government involvement.
 
Bob001 said:
How did the press, broadly speaking, cover these cases at the time? Did they just swallow the government's account, or did they do their own investigations? In the U.S., the notion that hundreds of postmasters across the country suddenly turned crooked would have spurred quite a lot of interest.
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Bear in mind there was no massive rush of cases, just a slow steady drip feed of people being taken to court for fraud and of course the PO could present the argument the new software was uncovering fraud that had gone unnoticed previously. It took some time for anyone to grasp that there was something very wrong going on.
 
Darat said:
There was no government involvement.
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What? Who prosecuted them and sent them to prison? Who runs the post office? Presumably they are the entities who were describing what they claimed was massive fraud. What do you mean?
 
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Darat said:
The Royal Mail prosecuted them. See my ETA in this post: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13463050#post13463050
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Isn't the Royal Mail a government entity? And surely they don't have their own courts, right? I would think the Royal Mail would have pressed charges, and government prosecutors would have, well, prosecuted them? By government I mean all parts and divisions of the government; do you just mean Parliament, or what?

ETA: I see that the Royal Mail became a private company in 2015, after 500 years as a government agency. That might explain part of what happened here; corporate executives are less accountable than government officials. But postmasters would still have been prosecuted by the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail
 
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