This is a good example of why a jury trial is not always the best choice for a defendant. Juries are often overly impressed by authority figures, and assess the status of witnesses rather than the evidence itself.
What I find totally amazing about this whole scandal is that they ignored one of the most obvious and overwhelming examples of Ockham's razor I've ever seen.
On the one hand, you had the possibility of hundreds of sub-postmasters committing fraud in many different unrelated locations. There was zero evidence of them taking any money even after really deep scrutiny.
On the other hand, there was the possibility of software being buggy.
How could they happily conclude it was the first and not the second option is impossible to understand, and leaves me deeply worried about the UK legal system.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In order to support the existence of such a distributed fraud scheme, they should have brought convincing evidence. There was zero. Furthermore, they happily ignored an option that is several orders of magnitude more likely. Namely, that badly built software fails and management was deliberately hiding this to save their face.
> you had the possibility of hundreds of sub-postmasters committing fraud in many different unrelated locations
It is unfortunately fairly common. I have a friend who has been working for the USPS for over twenty years; way back when he got started, a co-worker was busted for pocketing cash from stamp sales. He was my roommate at the time, and was freaking out because she was trying to pin it on him, had to talk to the FBI, etc; the investigators figured out that she had been running the scam over 10+ years (something like $130k if I remember correctly (pocketing about 25 bucks a day, adds up!)). Retail scams just aren’t very unusual.
But you are correct in that evidence is, like, kind of important in a trial…
Yup. I knew someone who worked in the Ministry of Justice in France and he was ecstatic when they announced they would stop jury trials for criminal charges.
He said juries just aren't that great at the job. They're easily influenced by current events, susceptible to fallacies, etc. A lot more so than judges, according to my acquaintance (who was admittedly biased).
So they just use a single judge instead? That is (obviously) not always superior.
What about a panel of highly-trained rational-evidence evaluators? This would absolutely be superior to laypeople... Except for the corruption potential
The government should not have brought these cases in the first place. George Orwell and the American founders were hyper critical of the paternalistic and controlling nature of the British aristocracy precisely because it leads to this kind of thing happening.
As a software person who has to write tests validating his systems all the time, who was also a juror in a trial that was a travesty... it strikes me as extremely odd that we don't run "mock trial tests" on this of all systems, where the jury, judge and lawyers don't know it's a test.
If it's too difficult to fake evidence, we could randomize say 1% of the cases where the convicted is exonerated and given immunity and asked to anonymously report their actual guilt to a system in the interest of supporting a better legal system... yeah, this too would be difficult... hmmm... there must be a way to do this
We've seen time and time again how juries become "unanimous" in their conviction of innocent people. So I'm not sure why you're putting so much weight into 12 people coming to an agreement in a closed room. It happens.
