All eyes on 23 April

Earlier today I posted up my final court report for this week – The Opposed Appeals. The rest of my Friday has been spent dealing with the life admin that court days force you to put on hold.

As mentioned yesterday, the judgment will be handed down on Friday 23 April at 10am.

As well as the obvious possible import of up to 42 convictions being quashed, any judicial findings on the actions of individuals within the Post Office could prove interesting.

Why did John Scott, the Post Office Head of Security order documents to be shredded? On whose instructions was he acting?

Orders like that are not issued in a vacuum. He sought to shred documents for a reason. That reason was created by something – it didn’t just pop into his head. Their lady and lordships might decide to say something about that, and other troubling matters.

Law Commission

In other news, the rather strange two-man Westminster Hall “debate” between Darren Jones MP and the DCMS minster earlier this month may have had an effect.

The Law Commission says it now may look at the legal presumption that “computer-generated evidence is reliable unless proved otherwise” in the light of the “damaging findings in the Royal Mail sub-post offices Horizon IT litigation” [never thought of calling it that before!]

The barrister Stephen Mason has long campaigned against this rather idiotic concept. Shortly before Christmas he and several other learned professionals put a paper in front of Mr Jones, explaining exactly why.

The idea that if computers look like they work and smell like they work then they probably do work was an outdated notion in the 1990s (when the presumption was written into law).

As Mr Jones said in his speech in the debate, nowadays machine learning algorithms are “coming to conclusions for reasons even the computer programmer doesn’t understand.”

I’m sure in a few years we’ll have machines with the capability to deceive. Then what?

Incidentally the Law Commission news is published in an article called “Ideas for Law Reform“, but the URL literally calls the webpage a “kite-flying-document” – which suggests it isn’t exactly top of the agenda.

Housekeeping

There will not be daily secret emails over the next few weeks, which I suspect will be something of a relief to you.

In fact, for the first time in a long time there are no trials or court hearings in the offing at all. There is the Williams Inquiry and now the prospect of a judicial review application into its continued existence.

There is also bound to be some parliamentary activity to report and I will obviously send you an email every time I put up a blog post, but I am rather hoping to withdraw a little. I will, of course, be at the 23 April hearing, and always on the lookout for new information, so please do keep sending it in.

As always when this story gets into the media, quite a few people who were hitherto unknown to me have got in touch with what seems like the good stuff. I will now try to find the time to speak to them all and see what new avenues open up.

More anon, no doubt. Thanks very much for all the exceptionally kind messages you have sent me over the past few days – they have been a wonderful motivating force at the end of some very long days.

Have a great weekend.

Nick