The Post Office Horizon scandal is possibly the most serious corporate failure in the United Kingdom in living memory, and possibly for more than a century. This is because of its disastrous consequences for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of individuals who were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office and who lost their livelihoods, and often their homes, on the basis of incomplete and misleading evidence from its Horizon computerized accounting system. That corporate failure has given rise to th...| journals.sas.ac.uk
There exists widespread misunderstanding about the nature of computers and how and why they are liable to fail. The present approach to the disclosure or discovery and evaluation of evidence produced by computers in legal proceedings is unsatisfactory. The central problem is the evidential presumption that computers are reliable. This presumption is not warranted. To this end, recommendations are proposed to rectify this problem with the aim of increasing the probability of a fair trial.| journals.sas.ac.uk
In this paper Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bev Littlewood, Harold Thimbleby and Martyn Thomas CBE consider the condition set out in section 69(1)(b) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE 1984) that reliance on computer evidence should be subject to proof of its correctness, and compare it to the 1997 Law Commission recommendation that a common law presumption be used that a computer operated correctly unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary (LC Presumption). The authors unders...| journals.sas.ac.uk