@jcyclops
There is a lot of blame to go around. In some cases I am disgusted at the juries sitting in the criminal cases. Read this carefully and ask yourself if you were a juror and heard this, could you return a guilty verdict beyond reasonable doubt.
This quotation is from the judge's summing up in a 2010 case against a sub-postmaster:
“There is no direct evidence of her taking any money… She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched.”
The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.
The jury returned a guilty verdict, and the pregnant sub-postmaster was sentenced to 15-months for stealing £74,000
And this, from another poster:
it was followed by this question from the judge: “Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?” It was almost like he was recognising no evidence as far as the defendant was concerned, but then directing the jury to deliver a verdict based on the guilt of the system, not the defendant. If this is how it happened, I can understand how a jury found her guilty, based on the direction they were given.
The problem is that most (not all) juries aren’t clever or knowledgeable enough to form a sensible view on complex fraud cases like this.
The judge was telling the jury that they had to decide whether the prosecution’s case - which was that Horizon was robust and infallible - was solid. That was the fundamental question, so I don’t see a problem with the direction he or she gave.
The difficulty is, if you have a bunch of average people sitting on a jury, how are they supposed to have the insight or experience to know that computer systems can be full of holes, or only as good as the people writing the software?
Generally speaking, they won’t. Computer says no (or computer said yes, in this case). If you had a jury of accountants, criminal solicitors, academics and software engineers, it would have been very different, because those people are either trained to question statements and examine evidence, or they are subject matter experts. You don’t get many of those people sitting on juries though. They might be called, but I suspect (but don’t know) that quite a few opt out.
I think that for certain types of trial, we should have juries chosen from a subset of the population who can understand the subject matter.