At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says • Hacker News Board

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#141

Post by mike_hearn » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:04 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #54

mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public. As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree…

It's quite possible he will end up going to prison, and absolutely, that would be the right outcome. It's hard to know what was going through his mind as he made that decision.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#142

Post by louthy » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

Joeboy wrote: post #136

louthy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in other words: the state. No ‘deep’ needed unless you’re trying to be emotive. Fujitsu is not part of the state and although the Post Office is owned by the state, it’s a stand-alone company. > “Perfectly respectable” Maybe in some fringe circles, but this term is certainly attached to a huge amount extreme propaganda and conspiracy that attempts to undermine western democracy and institutions.

The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state, notably in that they acted like an unconstrained branch of the CPS in bringing prosecutions against thousands of people. > Maybe in some fringe circles I would say the fringe circles co-opted it over the last couple of decades, and the term's obviously become heavily associated with them in some people's minds (eg. yours). But it's an olde…

> The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state

I agree. The are part of the state. They are a standalone company, but wholly owned by the state. But other aspects of the state (eventually) reacted to the injustice: MPs, select committees, ministers, the public inquiry, and hopefully next the legal system as some of these people should be in jail.

> But it's an older term than that.

Fine, I’m happy to accept that. Just like I’m happy to accept that R&B has nothing to do with BB King any more (well, actuality I still struggle with that).

Definitions and usage change. The current usage is the one that matters. Not the legacy definition.

When the original poster wrote “massive deep state cover-up” I think the implication is that shadowy figures throughout the state are pulling cover-up levers, when it was one privately owned company and one publicly owned company. The rest of the state moved (albeit slowly) to expose this and make it right.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#143

Post by duncans » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up).

See Nick Wallis' coverage: * https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html * https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/

> [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.

> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.

> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”

...

> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”

> No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:

> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#144

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #132

mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one. There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization priori…

Indeed. "Deep" is a weasel word. "State" is all the operations of governance which don't change when the government changes.

However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304

(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#145

Post by PaulRobinson » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #123

zapzupnz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious to know how American legal system is better than any other country’s. From the outside looking in, it looks just as broken if not worse. You may have been kidding, but I’m sure someone will genuinely think so and have some decent arguments for it.

My favourite inspiration goes the opposite direction. The United States has this Supreme Court, a final Court of Appeal, politically independent and empowered even to decide that the government's actions are illegal. Sounds great. The UK had this rather antique thing called the "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary" aka "Law Lords" who were in theory just some Lords (ie people who are arbitrarily in the upper chamber of the P…

The Prime Minister can influence earlier in the chain though: they get to approve appointments to the Lords as a whole. Who then gets appointed to positions within the Lords is none of their business, but they can tip the scale if they need to.

It's actually for this reason that for hundreds of years until the early 21st century there was real concern about having a Catholic prime minister. There was even hand-wringing over PMs of other denominations, but the history of Catholicism in the UK in particular raised concern. Why? The PM has final approval of the Lords Spiritual - the bishops from the Church of England who are there to provide a protestant spiritual dimension to all debates before that House.

It's allegedly for this reason that Tony Blair (married to a Catholic) waited until after he left office to convert. I think it was either Brown or Cameron who then got the law explicitly changed to not bar Catholics and other religions to serve as PM.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#146

Post by dcow » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

some_random wrote: post #121

dcow wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still suicide. The wrongfully imprisoned can be acquitted. That’s part of the argument against the death penalty: if justice is imperfect then don’t take actions that are permanent. You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. I really don’t see the issue you’re trying to raise. It’s more problematic to invent new language because it feels yucky than to be precise and accurate in…

I don't think they're arguing that the headline should be "13 UK postmasters murdered by the state", just that the extremely passive "died by suicide" lacks context and largely leaves out the UK Post Office's role in their death. I think they would prefer some thing along the lines of "At Least 13 People Killed Themselves After False Accusations From U.K. Post Office, Report Says".

I’m fine with that. And I agree with the sentiment, just not the conclusion that we should be reporting these as not-suicide. If the original comment was indeed that tempered then I have no issue.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#147

Post by tw04 » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #132

mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one. There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization priori…

I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups. For instance there was an entire branch of AT&T that was dedicated to illegally spying on Americans for the NSA.

Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.

By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.

Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#148

Post by sitkack » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

maweki wrote: post #115

mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

The horizon post office scandal is the first thing I taught in my "database design" course, to show that we're not creating self-serving academic exercises. We are creating systems that affect people's lives. I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.

Or, if you are designing software to kill people, that you actually do a good job.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cia-allegedly-bought-flawe...

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#149

Post by dcow » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #130

dcow wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still suicide. The wrongfully imprisoned can be acquitted. That’s part of the argument against the death penalty: if justice is imperfect then don’t take actions that are permanent. You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. I really don’t see the issue you’re trying to raise. It’s more problematic to invent new language because it feels yucky than to be precise and accurate in…

> You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. It's literally what we call it in Norway. In English it's compared to miscarriage (i.e. spontaneous abortion), "miscarriage of justice". Here we call it murder of justice (justismord), whether anyone actually died or not. I do think it gets the seriousness across, and the focus on it as a deliberate act, rather than an accident as in Engli…

Interesting.

> Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.

And those people are at fault and should be criminally prosecuted for the harm they caused.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#150

Post by mike_hearn » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

maweki wrote: post #115

mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

The horizon post office scandal is the first thing I taught in my "database design" course, to show that we're not creating self-serving academic exercises. We are creating systems that affect people's lives. I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.

That's good to hear. I'm sure the story makes an impact!