{"id":223151,"date":"2024-01-12T15:31:48","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T15:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/?p=223151"},"modified":"2024-01-12T15:31:48","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T15:31:48","slug":"update-law-on-computer-evidence-to-avoid-horizon-repeat-ministers-urged-post-office-horizon-scand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/update-law-on-computer-evidence-to-avoid-horizon-repeat-ministers-urged-post-office-horizon-scand\/","title":{"rendered":"Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged | Post Office Horizon scand…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ministers need to \u201cimmediately\u201d update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal<\/a>, legal experts say.<\/p>\n

In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be \u201creliable\u201d unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases.<\/p>\n

Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: \u201cIt says, for the person who\u2019s saying \u2018there\u2019s something wrong with this computer\u2019, that they have to prove it. Even if it\u2019s the person accusing them who has the information.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mason, along with eight other legal and computer experts, was invited by the government to suggest an update to the law in 2020, following a high court ruling against the Post Office<\/a>, but the recommendations they submitted were never applied.<\/p>\n

He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009. \u201cMy view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn\u2019t in place,\u201d Mason said.<\/p>\n

The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that \u201cmechanical instruments\u201d should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work.<\/p>\n

For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system<\/a> began.<\/p>\n

As a result, when post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed.<\/p>\n

The influence of English common law internationally means that the presumption of reliability is widespread. Mason cites cases from New Zealand, Singapore and the US that upheld the standard and just one notable case where the opposite happened.<\/p>\n

In 2007, a Toyota Camry on an Oklahoma highway accelerated suddenly and stopped responding to controls, eventually crashing and killing a woman and seriously injuring a second. It was one of a rash of claims at the time that Toyota\u2019s vehicles were experiencing uncontrolled acceleration, but thanks to panicked messages from the car\u2019s passengers, one of the only ones with hard evidence suggesting an electronic malfunction.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs little as a single bit flip can cause the driver to lose control of the engine speed in real cars due to software malfunction that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe,\u201d one expert witness in the case said<\/a>. Toyota eventually settled to avoid punitive damages, after a jury awarded $3m in compensation to two women.<\/p>\n

The rise of AI systems made it even more pressing to reassess the law, said Noah Waisberg, the co-founder and CEO of the legal AI platform Zuva. \u201cWith a traditional rules-based system, it\u2019s generally fair to assume that a computer will do as instructed. Of course, bugs happen, meaning it would be risky to assume any computer program is error-free.<\/p>\n

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