Post Office lawyers held secret meeting with judge to stop disclosure

> ‘I was simply not aware of the duties on a prosecutor to make sure an expert witness was fully aware of their duties.’

We cannot have a system where people can be wrongly convicted while being denied a proper defence due to incompetence. Either incompetence cannot be a defence, or convictions must not be permitted to be made where incompetence might lead to an injustice.

Or another way of looking at this: "the prosecution's case would fail if anybody involved on the prosecution's side turns out to be incompetent" should be an absolute defence in any trial and if that situation arises then it must always fail to result in a conviction.

So far, to my knowledge, none of the people that botched this spent a day in jail. So what good are these inquiries that span years until they fade out of public interest, maybe some people get a slap on the wrist and they move on with their lives like nothing happened while others had their lives ruined beyond repair?

> "public interest immunity"

This is a dead giveaway that someone is setting up a miscarriage of justice to protect someone in power. They were a crucial part of the Matrix-Churchill fiasco, for example. https://www.theguardian.com/world/defence-and-security-blog/...

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/the-cover-up-a-hope-the-sc...

This seems like perversion of the legal process. It's the kind of thing that gets custodial sentences when normal people do it.

Looking at https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/crown-court/it... it seems like A1 for culpability / harm, 2-7 years prison.

Private meetings are fine. No issue there. The judge however, erred. He should've never allowed the disclosure to not be disclosed. You can redact information that is harmful to the state, or is not relevant to the case, but in this case, the fact that the system that was being used as the basis of detection of fraud, was in itself being audited, should've meant that it was to be included and disclosed to defense.

In my non-lawyer opinion, the judge is the one that erred, and it is compounded that this matter came up in a private meeting without defense, thereby supporting the idea that private meetings should never be had, when there are always exceptions for them.

So yes, this looks really bad all around.

Tip of the iceberg imho, I would say this is fairly standard practice in UK law now for everything from police notebooks to dna evidence.

UK legal system stopped being about law and became all about trying to stem the collapse of trust in it a very long time ago.

Now imho there is nothing to trust, every decision some corrupt kafka like show of idiocy.

To see how corrupt they are you only need to look at Rishi soon sacked taking pride in a promise to leave the EHCR if they dont let him deprive a few people of basic human rights in order to demonstrate he is tough on immigration - all while his government gives every illegal immigrant free hotel accomodation and a huge weekly allowance higher to make them come in the first place.

The only thing we are seeing here is yet another public glimpse into why no one I know still in the UK, rich or poor, has any faith in its institutions any more.

Many, like myself, move from a developing country to a developed country not to get a better job / more money, but instead we spend a great deal of money to get away from lawlessness. It is precisely to get away from shenanigans like this.

Now i am starting to think all the great efforts were in vain

People's lives were ruined over this. People committed suicide over this.

Those complicit in ruining their lives to cover the blunder of the post office, execs, and third party companies should see jail time. The careers and paychecks of the wealthy and powerful do not trump justice and lives lost.

> Smith suggested that an investigation report from the time should not be disclosed to [Noel Thomas] when it was reviewed in 2014. If it was to be disclosed, the inquiry heard, it should be heavily redacted – and Smith himself had written that Thomas should not be shown a Post Office note from 2005 which noted that operator Fujitsu was testing the reliability of Horizon.

> ‘Such a [note] may well invite a request for disclosure of the test results,’ Smith had emailed a colleague. ‘There may also be a risk that [Thomas] will suggest the investigation was inadequate or incomplete.’

Yeah, no shit.

You know, in my company we have yearly "compliance training" courses where we have to hear imaginary stories about employees who gave gifts to potential clients, illegally agreed to divide up the market with competitors, and so on. I feel like everyone in the prosecutor's office should be forced to read a certain number of cases of innocent people who were wrongly convicted every year, including all the quotes like this.

For the UK legal system the meme needs to be : Attribute to malice what most would consider just incompetence....

The Post Office’s culpability is manifest, but this is first and foremost a massive miscarriage of justice that discredits the British judiciary and its chumminess with fellow Establishment members.

Holy cow. The more I read about this disaster, the worse it gets.

I really hope that folks get what's coming, but the UK has a double set of laws, one for the Peers, and one for the Poors.

I suspect that the guilty includes a lot of "Peers."

The UK legal system (in all its nations) is very much a broken and unfair one where power alone decides your guilt through abuse of procedure.

Just look at their private prosecution system, the government pays the bills of the private prosecutor but not the defense so you can just run the trial until your opponent is bankrupt.