Establishing innocence when computer data indicates guilt

Abstract

The Post Office scandal has been widely described as the UK’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice. During the period between 1999 and 2015 over 900 people were convicted of theft and false accounting offences. These convictions were based on data from the faulty Horizon IT system. Whilst the statutory Post Office inquiry continues to examine the wide-ranging failings that led to these convictions, one area that deserves consideration is how the repeal of section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (Evidence from Computer Records) enabled these convictions to be possible and whether the section should be reinstated.

This paper argues that a reinstatement of the dictum that ‘the computer is always wrong,’ unless proved otherwise, is not without its problems and will not resolve the issues that have come to the fore following the Post Office cases.