Dangers Posed by Evidentiary Software—and What to Do about It

It’s well known the code is buggy; that’s why software updates for anything from apps to operating systems are now the norm. But if the public understands this, the courts have not followed suit.

In the UK, there was a major long-running scandal involving the Post Office Limited (POL)—not to be confused with the government-owned Royal Mail, which delivers the mail—and its many-year pursuit of “subpostmasters” whom it accused of theft. The evidence brought against the accused came from discrepancies in the software accounting system. In thousands of cases, some involving quite large sums of money, the central accounts didn’t match the subpostmasters accounts, and the POL accused thousands of the subpostmasters of stealing funds. The accused had little recourse in the legal proceedings; since 1997, the UK Law Commission