A fundamental misunderstanding of the reliability of computers is partly why the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty is tainted Scandal at the post officeaccording to an academic research project.
One finding was that a lawyer defending a deputy postmaster wrongly accused of shortfalls told the defendant that no juror would believe that a prestigious government organization would have a “dodgy computer.”
The email scandal has already forced the government to consider changing the rules for using computer evidence in court, and now scientists are recommending a review of the practice of reducing the prison sentence of the accused as a reward for pleading guilty.
More than 900 former deputy postmasters have been wrongly convicted of crimes based on data from the Post Office's faulty Horizon computer system. The government accepted that the prosecution was wrongful and, as part of their study, researchers at the University of Exeter Law School collected information from 35 victims.
Their research report, Access to injustice? Experiences of representation and the criminal justice system during the Post Office scandal., shows that The “golden thread” of British justice, that people are innocent until proven guilty, “has been exposed by the Post Office scandal as more tainted than previously thought.”
The study was carried out by Post Office Research Project and University of Exeter Law School Evidence-Based Justice Research Project experts Sally Day, Richard Moorhead and Rebecca Helm, as well as Karen Noakes from UCL.
The researchers say: “A bird's-eye view of the criminal justice system provided to the researchers by former postmasters shows that the phrase 'innocent until proven guilty' has rarely been taken seriously enough by any part of the criminal justice system that [they] made contact.”
As reported by Computer Weekly More broadly, the Post Office scandal has already exposed the inadequacy of the legal standard for computer evidence, which assumes that a computer system is working correctly unless there is clear evidence to the contrary.
In May 2024, Parliament approved a law abolishing more than 900 wrongful convictions which were based on data from the Horizon system, which were proved unreliable in the High Court in 2019.
The Justice Department issued an order this year. call for information as it explores the role of computer evidence in the criminal justice system to prevent another Scandal at the post office.
Researchers also report that legal teams representing prosecuted former postmasters did not always believe them when they claimed innocence, due to unfamiliarity with computers and misplaced respect for the Post Office. One of the victim deputy postmasters told them that their lawyer said, “No twelve people on the jury would believe that a prestigious government organization would have a sophisticated computer system.”
It was this misinformed attitude and lack of disclosure that, according to the study, “prompted several attorneys” to emphasize to clients that they were up against a “powerful, well-resourced institution” and that there was “no point in fighting this case.”
“Lawyers left to advise clients in the absence of Post Office disclosure typically encouraged their clients to plead guilty in the hope that they could avoid prison by evading rather than responding to the client's pleas of innocence,” the researchers said.
Moorhead, a professor at the University of Exeter, is leading the research team. “Lawyers treated plea decisions as routine, whereas for postmasters they were life-changing,” he said. “Claims of innocence were not taken seriously. Their opponent behaved horribly, but the clients' stories were also not fully understood or explored by those they were supposed to believe.”
Moorhead said there was “deep negligence.” [defendant] treatment by their lawyers and the courts.”
Helm, also a university professor, said: “The pressures and culture that allowed such injustice to happen are still at work in the criminal justice system today. In fact, they may be worse.”
The researchers recommend that the Sentencing Council revise its guidelines for guilty pleas to ensure that defendants are not forced to plead guilty before the case is solved or when expert evidence is needed.
There was a mail scandal first published in Computer Weekly magazine in 2009.revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they faced due to accounting software. (See Computer Weekly's timeline of articles on the scandal below.)
