131–140 of 276 posts
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Ken Lay of Enron.
The exception that proves the rule. It would have been more accurate for OP to have said we haven't tried prosecuting and imprisoning CEOs, etc, with the same vigor we apply to street crime. Every great once in a while, yes, we actually prosecute the hell out of a few executives. But it's hardly commonplace.
travesty of justice doesn't begin to describe it. there must be something else wrong besides just the software? how could the justice department just blindly trust the software accounting without any other evidence.
You are misunderstanding how much of a travesty this is. No government organisation (typically the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales) was involved in bringing these prosecutions. The Post Office itself was legislatively empowered to bring private prosecutions of their employees to the state courts of England. The whole thing is insane.
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> "In 2013, Vennells hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed up by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract." Inexcusable.
Yes totally but shouldn’t it have been the prosecution that hired forensic accountants in order to, well, prosecute
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Clearly, there must have been systemic issues at Fujitsu which allowed the accounting software to fail so spectacularly.
Horizons was based on a failed benefits system and it was widely known that the quality of the software team was not good. IIRC it didn't even use ACID transactions, so glitches and power outages could cause big problems. What sort of company would put their Z team on a multi-billion pound contract?
Things still going on right now: Prosecutions are still going on but are being led by the Crown Prosecution Service (vs. the post office). Fujitsu are continuing to proving the CPS / post office with data that they have been doing for years (and possibly still providing witness statements, I dunno). Subpostmasters still complain about bugs in the horizon software causing balance errors. Subpostmasters still get fined…
The Wikipedia article on Paula Vennells tells me that the Post Office prosecuted 700 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015 [0]. That works out to about one prosecution every 8 days. I do not know the baseline rate at which postmasters commit fraud or are prosecuted, but isn't one prosecution every 8 days an awfully high number? Shouldn't the Post Office have conducted some sort of internal investigation as soon as the…
One possibility is that the PO bosses thought that there had always been a high level of theft and that Horizons system was finally uncovering it. The ultimate case of projecting your own failings onto others by grasping and immoral execs? I mean seriously, if you were a criminal, would you go to all the trouble to run a post office for years?
There is no way to make good the harm inflicted, and I'm skeptical that anyone except, maybe the innocent, are going to be punished. The central villain of this shit show is the Post Office. The history of the project shows that - from initial procurement onwards. Poorly implemented by ICL, a UK company, taken over by Fujitsu as some sort of favour to the UK government. The developers are guilty but this is just anot…
You can't make it fully right, since you can't give people back the time they spent wrongfully imprisoned. But you can at least throw a truckload of cash at them to make things a little less awful.
But yeah... these people will never get their lives back, and it will never be right. This is mainly why I am against capital punishment. Even if we do believe we should have the right to say who lives and who dies (I'm not convinced of that, but many people are), we do not have the ability to say with any certainty that anyone is actually guilty. While the state can later recognize a mistake and let someone out of prison, they can't bring someone back who they executed.
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> What really bothers me is that the CEO of the Organisation at the time was also a Christian priest/deacon At the risk of making a No True Scotsman argument, it's anyone's guess as to whether or not she truly is a Christian. The only conclusion I can really draw from this is that she apparently acted in a way that's not consistent with Christian ideals.
She acted just like a person with Christian ideals.
How so?
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You are misunderstanding how much of a travesty this is. No government organisation (typically the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales) was involved in bringing these prosecutions. The Post Office itself was legislatively empowered to bring private prosecutions of their employees to the state courts of England. The whole thing is insane.
Reminds me of private prosecutions here in Canada. Is it similar or does the postal office have specific powers that go even beyond that?
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Wait, "private" meaning a non-government entity such as a corporation can prosecute someone, without any involvement of the public justice system, and send people to jail? I assume not just any private entity is empowered to do this, but still... Wow, it's bad enough here in the US that we have a private prison system, but that really takes the cake.
Yes. Really weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/private-prosecutions
whats happened here is a total fuck up of justice, with many many people lying
and the fact people/ judges have believed computer printouts as fact - ffs