As usual, incisive and penetrating analysis by Moorhead.
The legal profession is coming out of the Williams Inquiry rather badly. It's interesting that a similar theme is emerging at exactly this time on the other side of the Atlantic (Enrich, Servants of the Damned).
For a long time, it has been becoming clear that the central question in the administration of justice is - "how much justice can you afford" - hence the emergence of SLAPPs in stifling public discourse. The Post Office catastrophe demonstrates beyond much dispute that for the majority of ordinary small businesses, the answer to that question is 'not very much'. Tracy Felstead went to prison aged 19 because the Post Office and Fujitsu baulked at the cost of providing the technical evidence that her expert had (specifically) requested - that might have exceeded the value of the shortfall for which she was prosecuted. Neat, and disgraceful.
The disaster is a wider societal one, not least in broken and damaged frequently close communities. But it's also a serious indictment (sic) of the often rather poor quality of the judiciary who were willing to see hundreds of innocent people convicted on the basis of an almost childlike belief in the reliability of computer systems - together with institutional deference to large institutions such as the Post Office. (It's part of the explanation why litigating successfully against banks is so difficult.)
It's a shame that the Court of Appeal in 2021 didn't feel it necessary to consider why so many people were convicted on the basis of duff evidence. Some valuable lessons might have been, but have not been, learned.
As usual, incisive and penetrating analysis by Moorhead.
The legal profession is coming out of the Williams Inquiry rather badly. It's interesting that a similar theme is emerging at exactly this time on the other side of the Atlantic (Enrich, Servants of the Damned).
For a long time, it has been becoming clear that the central question in the administration of justice is - "how much justice can you afford" - hence the emergence of SLAPPs in stifling public discourse. The Post Office catastrophe demonstrates beyond much dispute that for the majority of ordinary small businesses, the answer to that question is 'not very much'. Tracy Felstead went to prison aged 19 because the Post Office and Fujitsu baulked at the cost of providing the technical evidence that her expert had (specifically) requested - that might have exceeded the value of the shortfall for which she was prosecuted. Neat, and disgraceful.
The disaster is a wider societal one, not least in broken and damaged frequently close communities. But it's also a serious indictment (sic) of the often rather poor quality of the judiciary who were willing to see hundreds of innocent people convicted on the basis of an almost childlike belief in the reliability of computer systems - together with institutional deference to large institutions such as the Post Office. (It's part of the explanation why litigating successfully against banks is so difficult.)
It's a shame that the Court of Appeal in 2021 didn't feel it necessary to consider why so many people were convicted on the basis of duff evidence. Some valuable lessons might have been, but have not been, learned.
Discussion about whether false accounting is less serious than theft - but supposing it weren't.
Even so, there is a Code for Crown Prosecutors at
https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors
which says
6.3. Prosecutors should never proceed with more charges than are necessary
just to encourage a defendant to plead guilty to a few.
[it then goes on to say the same about more/less serious charges]
In the same way,
they should never proceed with a more serious charge just to encourage
a defendant to plead guilty to a less serious one.