Despite all the convoluted excuses used by the PO's unethical lawyers there is one definitive lack of evidence which should be available to any accounting system which the law should use in any prosecution. You have an input which will have a reference and time stamp which was done at the Post masters terminal that transaction should then be transmitted to the PO system with the same reference and time stamp. If that happens you have a system that is accurate. However lots of things can go wrong , lost data packets, corrupted data packets all causing incorrect balances in the POs system. But what proof was there that the postmasters terminal transaction was received by the PO's system? We know they used remote access to try and correct the problems but that too would have a time stamp or should have. The judges were completely knaive to believe money had gone missing there was NO proof .Any forensic accountant would not have been satisfied money had gone missing. In any police enquiry looking at an accounting fraud the missing money is part of the proof and would be looked for. This basic proof was ignored by the judicial system. The legal system is prone to complicating as much as possible what happened that's what lawyers do, facts become opinions to be attacked by the defence. What was needed was a forensic accountant together with a computer expert and network expert to examine the system and produce a list of questions to be answered with definitive answers from the data in the system or from the system design specs or if that was not possible ( and they would have tried that!) examine the code of the system especially the message handling code and look for backdoor entry points. In effect you had a bunch of lawyers and judges who had no idea of what to look for and only made the situation worse by their meaningless debates on legal minutey and ignoring the facts.
Thanks for your time and effort in summarising and explaining.
The one thing that haunts me is to wonder how many other organisations take or have taken the same - or worse - approach to Legal Privilege, and the potential unjust consequences of that approach for other individuals, whose cases will never get this level of scrutiny
Why did the in-house lawyers not override some of the advice given as a better balance of judgement or perhaps where there was a need to moderate?
On many occasions he used civil vs criminal to justify his actions. Parsons should not have been the conduit to Cartwright King. The in-house legal guys should have co-ordinated between the civil and criminal cases/firms.
I wonder if the insurance in fact actually covered this kind of liability.
Gareth Jenkins position was that all the other issues he did not mention about Horizon were not relevant to the case in hand. As an aside, in practice a deep dive would have been necessary to verify this as the impact of any seemingly unrelated bug can have a complex set of failure modes. This included Remote Control. Whereas Second Sight were doing a case-independent review so it was mentioned to them. Everybody is thus saying he should have said more as the expert and that he contradicted himself (thus an unsafe witness). Another legal issue is what is considered materially disclosable/relevant and who decides? Especially when it comes to software/hardware systems like Horizon where it relies on a deep understanding. If any BEDs is material it implies you can never mount a prosecution using data from such a system. There would always be doubt. You could only go ahead If you were able to show immateriality through a deep-dive into each BED. Hardly practical. It then begs the question how does the Banking world deal with this when there are fraud/theft cases (either its own staff or its account holders) and all the evidence is in electronic form?
Parsons is a contradiction. On one level his actions are explainable in the context of a tough litigator, which he undoubtedly is, but stepping back his entire strategy was an unmitigated disaster. He also pops up giving advice on matters which go beyond his brief. It rather lends the impression that most of PO's executives, themselves out of control, were unable to
Despite all the convoluted excuses used by the PO's unethical lawyers there is one definitive lack of evidence which should be available to any accounting system which the law should use in any prosecution. You have an input which will have a reference and time stamp which was done at the Post masters terminal that transaction should then be transmitted to the PO system with the same reference and time stamp. If that happens you have a system that is accurate. However lots of things can go wrong , lost data packets, corrupted data packets all causing incorrect balances in the POs system. But what proof was there that the postmasters terminal transaction was received by the PO's system? We know they used remote access to try and correct the problems but that too would have a time stamp or should have. The judges were completely knaive to believe money had gone missing there was NO proof .Any forensic accountant would not have been satisfied money had gone missing. In any police enquiry looking at an accounting fraud the missing money is part of the proof and would be looked for. This basic proof was ignored by the judicial system. The legal system is prone to complicating as much as possible what happened that's what lawyers do, facts become opinions to be attacked by the defence. What was needed was a forensic accountant together with a computer expert and network expert to examine the system and produce a list of questions to be answered with definitive answers from the data in the system or from the system design specs or if that was not possible ( and they would have tried that!) examine the code of the system especially the message handling code and look for backdoor entry points. In effect you had a bunch of lawyers and judges who had no idea of what to look for and only made the situation worse by their meaningless debates on legal minutey and ignoring the facts.
Thanks for your time and effort in summarising and explaining.
The one thing that haunts me is to wonder how many other organisations take or have taken the same - or worse - approach to Legal Privilege, and the potential unjust consequences of that approach for other individuals, whose cases will never get this level of scrutiny
Well set out and analysed. Some thoughts:
Why did the in-house lawyers not override some of the advice given as a better balance of judgement or perhaps where there was a need to moderate?
On many occasions he used civil vs criminal to justify his actions. Parsons should not have been the conduit to Cartwright King. The in-house legal guys should have co-ordinated between the civil and criminal cases/firms.
I wonder if the insurance in fact actually covered this kind of liability.
Gareth Jenkins position was that all the other issues he did not mention about Horizon were not relevant to the case in hand. As an aside, in practice a deep dive would have been necessary to verify this as the impact of any seemingly unrelated bug can have a complex set of failure modes. This included Remote Control. Whereas Second Sight were doing a case-independent review so it was mentioned to them. Everybody is thus saying he should have said more as the expert and that he contradicted himself (thus an unsafe witness). Another legal issue is what is considered materially disclosable/relevant and who decides? Especially when it comes to software/hardware systems like Horizon where it relies on a deep understanding. If any BEDs is material it implies you can never mount a prosecution using data from such a system. There would always be doubt. You could only go ahead If you were able to show immateriality through a deep-dive into each BED. Hardly practical. It then begs the question how does the Banking world deal with this when there are fraud/theft cases (either its own staff or its account holders) and all the evidence is in electronic form?
Parsons is a contradiction. On one level his actions are explainable in the context of a tough litigator, which he undoubtedly is, but stepping back his entire strategy was an unmitigated disaster. He also pops up giving advice on matters which go beyond his brief. It rather lends the impression that most of PO's executives, themselves out of control, were unable to
effectively manage their own lawyers.