How Faulty Software Landed Dozens of UK Postmasters In Prison (usnews.com) 64
The Associated Press reports:
In a ruling that reversed one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, 39 people who ran local post offices had their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting overturned Friday because of what an appeals court said was clear evidence of "bugs, errors or defects" in an IT system.
The decision follows a years-long, complex legal battle that could see Britain's Post Office face a huge compensation bill for its failures following the installation, from 1999, of what turned out to be the defective Horizon computerized accounting system in local branches. Dozens of staff were convicted after the Fujitsu-supplied system pointed to an array of financial misdemeanors that bewildered the postal workers. Six others had their convictions quashed previously, while another 700 or so workers also are believed to have been prosecuted between 2000 and 2014... Jobs, homes and marriages were lost as a result of wrongful convictions, and some did not live long enough to see their names cleared by Britain's Court of Appeals.
Confirmation that the convictions were quashed was met with cheers and tears. A few bottles of bubbly were also popped.
Martin S. (Slashdot reader #98,249) writes, "As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting..." The BBC reports some desperate sub-postmasters even "attempted to plug the gap with their own money, even remortgaging their homes, in an (often fruitless) attempt to correct an error."
The judge in the case complains that for years the Post Office had "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "effectively steamrolled over any subpostmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy," according to an article in The Scotsman: Nick Read, Post Office chief executive said: "I am in no doubt about the human cost of the Post Office's past failures and the deep pain that has been caused to people affected. Many of those postmasters involved have been fighting for justice for a considerable length of time and sadly there are some who are not here to see the outcome today and whose families have taken forward appeals in their memory. I am very moved by their courage."
There were 73 convictions in Scotland caused by the failure. Although a total of 47 postmasters in England and Wales have had their cases referred to the Appeal Court, there has never been similar action in Scotland.
However, now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has written to the people it believes may also have been the victims of possible miscarriages of justice in Scotland relating to the Horizon computer system.
The decision follows a years-long, complex legal battle that could see Britain's Post Office face a huge compensation bill for its failures following the installation, from 1999, of what turned out to be the defective Horizon computerized accounting system in local branches. Dozens of staff were convicted after the Fujitsu-supplied system pointed to an array of financial misdemeanors that bewildered the postal workers. Six others had their convictions quashed previously, while another 700 or so workers also are believed to have been prosecuted between 2000 and 2014... Jobs, homes and marriages were lost as a result of wrongful convictions, and some did not live long enough to see their names cleared by Britain's Court of Appeals.
Confirmation that the convictions were quashed was met with cheers and tears. A few bottles of bubbly were also popped.
Martin S. (Slashdot reader #98,249) writes, "As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting..." The BBC reports some desperate sub-postmasters even "attempted to plug the gap with their own money, even remortgaging their homes, in an (often fruitless) attempt to correct an error."
The judge in the case complains that for years the Post Office had "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "effectively steamrolled over any subpostmaster who sought to challenge its accuracy," according to an article in The Scotsman: Nick Read, Post Office chief executive said: "I am in no doubt about the human cost of the Post Office's past failures and the deep pain that has been caused to people affected. Many of those postmasters involved have been fighting for justice for a considerable length of time and sadly there are some who are not here to see the outcome today and whose families have taken forward appeals in their memory. I am very moved by their courage."
There were 73 convictions in Scotland caused by the failure. Although a total of 47 postmasters in England and Wales have had their cases referred to the Appeal Court, there has never been similar action in Scotland.
However, now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has written to the people it believes may also have been the victims of possible miscarriages of justice in Scotland relating to the Horizon computer system.
We've been here before.... (Score:5, Informative)
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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And here I was, thinking DIFFERENT faulty software led to the wrongful convictions of dozens of UK postmasters and postmistresses!
Not faulty software (Score:2)
It was faulty evidence to cover up the faulty software that caused the convictions.
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It was much worse than that. It was expert witness false testimony, the lied in court which lead to a miscarriage of justice and they are criminally and civilly liable for that false expert testimony. Those people who represented the corporation in court should be prosecuted and go to jail. What they did was a criminal act.
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https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
If only the same thing could happen to some "editors"
Re: We've been here before.... (Score:2)
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Someone(s) made a decision to sell this software even though they must have known that it was faulty. When the postmasters were first charged, they could have come forward. During they trial, they could have come forward. When they bad conviction was announced, they could have come forward.,
The reason they did not come forward: money.
Their punish
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Don't forget the judges that allowed a criminal conviction when the standard of proof had obviously not been met.
Re: I hope they continue historical precedent (Score:2)
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The auditors should have been employed by the prosecution, not the alleged victim. If the PROSECUTORS ordered the auditors not to find anything, that would be a HUGE issue. The courts just taking the word of an auditor hired by the alleged victim IS a violation of the standard of proof.
Had this been a civil case, of course the plaintiff would hire the auditor.
The convictions of post masters were public record, how did the court not know? I could buy that a case can slip through the cracks, but this happened
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The auditors should have been employed by the prosecution, not the alleged victim. If the PROSECUTORS ordered the auditors not to find anything, that would be a HUGE issue. The courts just taking the word of an auditor hired by the alleged victim IS a violation of the standard of proof.
That's exactly what happened. The post office was both prosecutor and victim (prosecution is one of their special powers). The prosecutor (the post office) effectively ordered the auditors not to find anything. This is a HUGE issue.
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And the issues are multiple. Conflict of interest is a big deal in courts.
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I am no expert on English law (or U.S. law for that matter), but I believe both allow a judge to direct the jury to find not guilty if they believe the standards for guilt have clearly not been met. At least in the past, under English law the judge could also direct a guilty verdict though the jury could ignore the direction. Under U.S. law, a judge may not direct a guilty verdict but they can actually vacate a guilty verdict.
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I don't now if the judge should have directed the jury in this case though. There was evidence. Pretty weak evidence but it was there nonetheless. I posted elsewhere about the judge summing up one of the cases [slashdot.org]. He seemed to be making it clear that there was very little evidence, yet the jury convicted. No idea if the judges in many other cases went the same way but if they did, I can accept that as the judges doing their part in the system.
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That certainly shows that the judge was paying attention and apparently didn't think much of the prosecution's case. I would have preferred if he had actually directed the jury to find not guilty outright. Or at least used a phrase like "...to establish that Horizon, unlike every other piece of software in the known universe, is perfect".
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No the people from Fujitsu and the Post Office who lied on the stand and in affidavits that it could not possibly be the software in the original trials need now to be prosecuted for attempting to pervert the course of justice and or perjury. The former in the UK has a maximum sentience of life imprisonment and unlimited fine, seems the way to go.
We need to make those responsible carry face the consequences of their actions.
Re:I hope they continue historical precedent (Score:5, Informative)
The judge at the Appeal Court has already sent a file to the prosecutors detailing where the errors and effectivly inviting them to go after the relevant people for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
This story has a lot longer to rumble as well - several of the victims committed sucide and there is always the chance of corporate manslaughter charges being brought.
Re: Another reason government should be small (Score:2)
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Since the post offices in the U.K. are private businesses, you should be arguing for at least a slightly larger government to increase accountability. At least if it's a government function the voters can throw the bums out once in a while (and get a fresh crop of bums, of course).
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The UK Post Office is neither government nor government owned. It's a business with shareholders.
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The people who fight to say Horizons was secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should be the ones paying now. Let them serve the same sentences that others served while they incorrectly defended the tool at the cost of their own employees livelihoods and freedom!
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Should be the ones paying now. Let them serve the same sentences that others served while they incorrectly defended the tool at the cost of their own employees livelihoods and freedom!
Deliberately abusing the justice system to falsely imprison someone is a much more serious crime than basic accounting fraud. Their sentences must be far greater than anything served by any of the postmasters.
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Anybody taking bets on that happening?
Me either.
I know it's true (Score:2)
Because the computer said so.
Ah UK at least this time I (Score:2)
When I was browsing earlier I saw postmistresses and chuckled wondering if the wives were jailed to;)
Uh (Score:3)
So what I don't understand is how these convictions stood.
Suppose I work for corporation XYZ, and an accounting tool says there's a million dollars missing from an account I control.
But the authorities can't find where the million dollars went, there's no record of what account it went to. (since with this faulty software there likely was no actual theft). They can't show that I authorized the transactions. They can't show that I withdrew any cash. They can't show any accounts I own with suspiciously high balances. My house and car are the same as before.
And they have 700 other cases that are similar, it's not just me.
Ergo: I say I didn't do it and they cannot find any way I benefited if I did do it.
How did this exceed the British government's standard of proof for a criminal conviction?
missing from the till? (Score:2)
missing from the till? If they are tacking cash then it may be that I was taking the bank drops home.
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Well again, it seems odds that 700 people don't have a shred of actual cash in their house or suspicious purchases.
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"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?"
As a software engineer myself this is also a huge red flag. It's typical for software hiding a pile of catastrophic bugs to "work" 90-99 percent of the time just fine without any problems. And for the testing team to seemingly never find anything that one time they tried a feature.
Yet when I examine the code I find muddled logic, use of dangerous thin
Re: Uh (Score:2)
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Errors in the other direction would look like the Post Office had more money than it should have. There's no incentive to pursue that further because it doesn't look like a theft, from their point of view.
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Regardless if the software is flawless, how would the software point out the person taking money out of the till without evidence?
Were they assuming it was clairvoyant?
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money_in_till = starting_money + cash_in; //BUG: does not account for giving change.
printf("This much money should be in the till: %f", money_in_till);
Manager counts till, finds that it doesn't contain money_in_till. It can't, because the software is reporting too much money.
If you completely trust the software, the logical assumption is the clerk stole money from the till. After all, they were the only people with access to the till, and clerks do steal from tills sometimes, whether or not the software i
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Or someone else has copied keys and sneaks in on lunch breaks and takes the money, or whatever ... I could see this being sufficient evidence for a civil suit after dismissal, the Brits convicting in a criminal trial purely based on this evidence suggests something is fundamentally wrong with their court system though.
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If the till was short, the subpostmaster was contractually obliged to top it up.
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You still need a proper accountant to show that there really is a shortfall. The crux of the problem is that Horizon apparently often claims the account should have more money than it actually should.
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I don't know how much more firmly a judge can say that it's a very weak case, yet the Jury, for some reason, accepted that software is flawless.
I'm not a fan of trial by jury, particularly particularly when the issues are technical such as about software. A panel of independent experts should be used in such cases, otherwise the jury hasn't a clue what it is about just goes the way of the most charming lawyer.
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More to the point, the software claims the till should contain $200, but only $150 is actually counted. BUT, the system cannot show how the till would have gone from the $50 it started with in the morning to $200. They SHOULD have had a full accounting that could go sale by sale and show where the extra $150 should have come from. If that can only show that $100 came in, there was no theft.
Instead, the prosecution used the old "The COMPUTER says..." (and yes, you can actually hear the all caps when someone
Trusting your tools (Score:2)
Beware of trusting your tools. The story of a collapsed building because of too much trust was put into computers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ethics in engineering is a real issue, and in software we don't have much.
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Beware of trusting your tools. The story of a collapsed building because of too much trust was put into computers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Ethics in engineering is a real issue, and in software we don't have much.
I agree totally. If people had only double checked their figures they wouldn't have landed in all this legal trouble in the first place. Same goes for trusting tax preparation software. Don't sign your return until you've checked everything carefully, then double checked it!
Re: Trusting your tools (Score:2)
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You've clearly not visited the parts I know and work in then, which over the last 30 years is pretty much most of it.
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You and I live in very different Britains. The jobsworths are derided and marginalised at every opportunity, and hold almost no power.
The problem here is not jobsworth-rule-following. It's that the Post Office believed it could shift the burden of proof to the victim, and demand that they prove they HADN'T embezzled money, which is almost impossible to do.
Expensive lawyers kept it going but the fact of the matter is that the Post Office basically said "You fiddled us, we have no proof of it, just that the
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I want to hear more from this guy, he's funny.
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It is incumbent on IT pros to not work for Fujitsu (Score:4, Interesting)
There are only a couple of companies that I won't flat out work for - Fujitsu is the most egregious of them. Remember the great Fujitsu hard drive debacles of the 2002 era? This was one reason and Horizons is another.
Fujitsu have lied on the stand, have colluded with the Post Office to insert false accounts into the system (they had update access to other peoples accounts and were falsley inserting records at the Post Offices behest) They have perjured on the stand, they have conspired (and succeeded!) in perverting the course of justice, and so far they have gotten away with it.
It is high time that people simply stopped working for them. Any recruiter that calls me wanting to offer a contract is told in no uncertain terms where to go. Refuse to deal with them. Don't consider them for tender. It's not worth your companies good name to contract with these people. They are cheap for a reason - and you can see this now.
Simply cut them off and punish them properly for their decades of failing in this regard. It's your moral duty to do so.
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Doesn't matter the company.
Never, ever get involved in any government IT project. They are universally shit - overpriced, unutterably poorly specified, implemented by morons, and then funded into perpetuity in the hope it will magically fix itself.
Local government, NHS, and then government QUANGOs and things like the Post Office, DVLA, etc. Never, ever, ever, ever - as an IT professional with an ounce of professional decency - go anywhere near them.
The only people who will touch them with a bargepole are
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No thats a different one, and IBM fessed up and replaced the duff ones we had with no questions.
Fujitsu HDD had a failure rate of about 80% outside the warranty period and Fujitsu just went "lalalal fingers in ears we are not listening" and cost us many thousands - we had a couple of hundred fail inside of six months. They knew there was a problem, they just decided to stonewall and completely ignore people.
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
Worked on government systems for years. (Score:2)
Dupe. (Score:2)
I sincerely hope
It wasn't faulty software .. (Score:1)
It wasn't faulty software. Rather than admit faults with the software, the Post Office put their own postmasters in jail.
Horizon (IT system)
How? (Score:2)