To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

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There is already a thread about this on the Telly Addicts forum here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/4970440-mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-mon-to-thur-itv-9pm-tv-pace-no-spoilers

However this seems like such an important subject that I thought I would draw attention to it on AIBU.

The first episode aired tonight but the whole series is available on itvx.

Most of you will no doubt have heard about the Horizon scandal, but whether you have or you haven't this program is compelling. It will probably make you furious but it deserves as wide an audience as possible.,

https://news.sky.com/story/david-smith-apologises-for-celebrating-conviction-of-pregnant-sub-postmaster-13112677

Is anyone going to go to jail over this ?

Just because the perpitraitors grouped together in an alliance of self preservation doesn't mean they shouldn't be accountable.

Recompence for the victims and jail time for the offenders who knowingly knew these people had been wrongly accused and procecuted.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68787990

The only 'apology' Seema Misra should accept is those responsible doing time for this.

I'd like to know if the judge who presided over her case is still around. I don't know if I am confusing her case with a different one, but there was a case where the judge indicated to the jury that the evidence was insufficient to convict but they convicted anyway. So why did the judge then pass a custodial sentence.

I don't agree with sending non-violent criminals to jail anyway, but if it was Seema, and she was 8 months pregnant, the judge also has questions to answer. A suspended sentence would have been adequate. Pregnant women should only be going to jail if they are a danger to society eg they've murdered someone.

Indeed, but this is how things are done in this country.

They are still lying to our face about how sorry they are and how quickly they are dealing with it, while neither is true.

It's blatant.

It would be satisfying if the roles were swapped and those affected could swan around in huge profits whilst those who lied, misdirected and blamed them lost all their wealth, standing in society and were villified by the public. The trouble is most of those resposible are usually made of Teflon and everything just slides right off them. The compensation needs to happen sooner.

The children of the affected postmasters are also bringing claims against the PO for how their lives have been blighted by the gross injustice perpetrated against their parents.

It's Alan Cook, the former Post Office managing director, today

He says he didn't realise the Post Office itself brought prosecutions against sub-postmasters

So he had no idea how the business he was managing was operating

The judge did not say the evidence was insufficient to convict. If he had said that, he would have directed the jury to return a not guilty verdict. He was clearly uneasy that there was no evidence as to where the money had gone and that the only evidence was from Horizon, but left it to the jury to decide if that was sufficient to convince them of her guilt. The jury decided, wrongly, that it was.

The judge passed a custodial sentence because he had no choice. He had to send her to prison. Judges are required by law to follow the sentencing guidelines. For this offence, given the amount of money supposedly involved and the level of culpability, the starting point for sentencing is 2 years in prison with a minimum of 1 year. You may disagree with it, but there was nothing wrong with the sentence.

A rather damning email from none other than Alan Cook:

https://twitter.com/JohnHyde1982/status/1778744651089928553

Just illustrates how those at the top saw those at the bottom. Not as respectable, hardworking business owners but as grubby little thieves ...

Something I was musing about in the middle of the night. Our justice system is built around innocent until proven guilty, but there are more and more cases where this is being flipped.

In my opinion, the post office came at this from the position of guilty until proven innocent, evidence of this was looked for, while they failed to do due diligence to find and investigate the evidence that would have supported the sub postmaster. They also denied them the ability to find this evidence meaning it was impossible to prove their innocence at that time.

Scrutiny should also be made of the judges that allowed this to happen in their courts.

The judge in a criminal trial does not check that the prosecution has disclosed all the evidence it should, nor do they review the investigation. In the Crown Court they simply ensure that the trial is conducted correctly, instruct the jury and, in the event of a guilty verdict, set the sentence.

It is not the judges that should be scrutinised. It is the lawyers who worked for Post Office who, it appears, colluded in covering up evidence that they were required to disclose to the defence by law. It is the investigators who didn't investigate and who told subpostmasters that no-one else was having problems with Horizon - a lie that would have been illegal if it was the police. And it is those within Post Office and Fujitsu who knew perfectly well that Horizon was flawed but chose to cover it up.

@prh47bridge thanks. I've not had much to do with the legal system so wouldn't know all the ins and outs. My knowledge comes from employment where best practice is to look for evidence that supports both arguments and that seems to be woefully lacking. They decided in advance that the sub postmasters were thieving and only looked for evidence confirming this bias, deliberately ignoring and suppressing evidence to the contrary.

I think that those who colluded to do this should be jailed, from the top to the bottom.

@prh47bridge A judge can dismiss a criminal case upon reading the CPS file if they think it isn't strong enough and before it gets into a court room. But I'm not sure if that applied to the PO cases, because some of the reported comments by judges seem to suggest them being wholly unimpressed with the 'evidence' presented and the expert witnesses. One case got thrown out when the evidence really didn't stack up and the judge said enough after the PO admitted their keyboard was faulty. In that case - featured in the TV drama - this was only after destroying the SPMs life and mental health.

Judges don't see the CPS file, they simply see the evidence that the defence gets.

Agree with @Anisette

Also, a judge in the UK cannot dismiss the case before trial unless the defence moves for dismissal. Even then, the bar for dismissing a case is very high. The defence is more likely to get the case dismissed after the prosecution has presented its evidence.

A large part of the problem is that the law currently says that courts must assume computer systems are reliable. Because of this, Post Office did not have to prove that Horizon's figures were reliable. Subpostmasters who argued that Horizon was responsible for their losses had to come up with evidence to show it was unreliable. This was always going to be very difficult. Post Office's failure to disclose things that they were required to disclose by law meant this was impossible.

Given the legal assumption about evidence from computer systems, there were no grounds on which judges could dismiss these cases. Horizon said there was a shortfall. That is therefore evidence that there was a shortfall that had to be explained.

@prh47bridge I defer to your better legal knowledge. One of my DPs friends was a traffic officer who investigated fatal road collisions and in one instance when the CPS wanted to put a case before a jury the judge refused. On exactly what legal grounds I don't know but it seemed to be a frankly technical issue with the witnesses he wasn't happy with.

It is not the judges that should be scrutinised

I disagree. Everyone in the justice system has a duty to the court, including the judges. More generally, and as an example, you'd want to know if judges were biased. That doesn't mean that the lawyers employed by, and acting for, the Post Office don't warrant regulatory investigation.

Given the legal assumption about evidence from computer systems, there were no grounds on which judges could dismiss these cases. Horizon said there was a shortfall. That is therefore evidence that there was a shortfall that had to be explained

It's a presumption but you can argue against it. The issue appears to be that the defence solicitors were out of their depth and didn't know what to argue I think. I suspect they secretly thought their clients were guilty in a lot of cases and just wanted the case to go away with minimal work for them and minimal punishment for the clients. And they probably realised that the post office had unlimited resources as well.

Interesting case mentioned in the Times today where it was the DWP that did the prosecuting. Court of Appeal refused to overturn the conviction because of a guilty plea and also said it wasn't convinced that the Horizon evidence was the key. There seemed to be quite a lot of information missing from the article.

That would have happened in the trial, not before. There isn't enough to say exactly what happened, but it could be that the judge disallowed some of the prosecution evidence and decided there wasn't sufficient left for a safe conviction.

There is nothing at all to indicate that the judges in these cases were biased. Most of them were guilty pleas - Post Office charged subpostmasters with both theft and false accounting as a tactic to extract a guilty plea to the lesser charge.

Yes, you can argue against the presumption that computer evidence is reliable, but you need evidence to do so. If a defendant wants to argue that a computer system is unreliable, the law (wrongly in my view) places the burden of proof on them. And Post Office did not disclose any of the evidence that defendants needed to prove that Horizon was unreliable. It didn't matter how competent or incompetent the defence solicitors were, they simply didn't have anything they could use to challenge Horizon.

As I understand it, several judges were involved in these cases, all over the country, both criminal and civil. It would be a hell of a stretch to say that all of them had some mystery bias in favour of the Post Office, and indeed it would be even more of a stretch to claim that any such bias extended to influencing juries to convict where otherwise they would have acquitted.

Just to give some idea of the scale of Post Office's non-disclosure, even in the civil case that Alan Bates and others won, they were resisting disclosure of things that were plainly relevant. For a long time they denied that there was a Known Error Log for Horizon, despite the fact that any professional software developer will have some kind of system for tracking issues. When they were forced to admit that there was a Known Error Log, they claimed it only contained entries such as, "if the printer doesn't work, hit it here". They were eventually forced to disclose the log by the judge. It contained thousands of relevant entries.

There is a very strong culture of secrecy in Post Office, which is a large part of the problem. It hasn't gone away. The inquiry is still having problems with disclosure of evidence by Post Office. And it is clear that there are still many in Post Office, some of them in senior positions, who think the subpostmasters are a bunch of thieves who got lucky.

And it is clear that there are still many in Post Office, some of them in senior positions, who think the subpostmasters are a bunch of thieves who got lucky.

That really is quite weird. They seriously believe that all over the country a load of SPMs of previous impeccable good character all decided to go rogue and steal money from them, and that they all managed to do it without the Post Office ever being able to trace any of the allegedly stolen money, and even though they were all operating computers that would, in the Post Office's belief, infallibly and accurately pick up their crimes. And they still believe that there was nothing wrong with Horizon even though there is incontrovertible evidence that it was at best a very fallible system. I'd love to know how they make all that work in their heads.

Slightly on a tangent, I'm quite puzzled by all those investigators telling SPMs that they were the only ones having trouble with Horizon. The vast majority of them must have known that was an outright lie, yet they happily carried on telling it. I'd love one of them to explain why they did that and, perhaps more saliently, who told them to do it and what justification they were given.

I watched a little of the evidence offered today by the Chairman of Post Office at the time. there was a list of the number of organisations he was either Chair of, or Director of, at the same time. Numerous, absolutely absurd, so many I couldn't list them here. This man, whose name escapes me, is one of those golden creatures, so valuable to corporate life they must be paid millions in case they're lured abroad. 😂😂😂jobs for the boys is hardly sufficient to describe it. No wonder they despise the rest of us as we roll over and take some more. Sickening.