Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.

Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.

You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.

> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.

Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?

In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.

I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.

The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.

The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.

> The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician

Sounds exactly like how things work with Attorney Generals for the states and the feds, as well as with many county attorneys in the US, especially the larger ones.

The large, large majority of cases in the US are prosecuted by career lawyers, not elected officials.

> Americans elect far too many of these roles

This varies a lot by state, btw.

> Sounds exactly like how things work with Attorney Generals for the states and the feds, as well as with many county attorneys in the US

Sure, in the same way that Australia is exactly like Greenland.

Even in relatively populous New York the org chart distance between your criminal prosecutor and an elected politician is significantly smaller than in England. Somewhere smaller there's an excellent chance that an elected politician has direct influence over the choice to prosecute you and that's unavoidably corrupting.

Is it as bad as the mistake of leaving the Pardon Power with an elected politician? No. That was unconscionable back when the the "First Black President" was a white guy named Bill and he used it to pardon crooked friends and family, and of course it's still unconscionable today when people just straight up pay Donald to get out of jail. But elected prosecutors is still pretty bad.

> This varies a lot by state, btw.

Almost everything does. On a good day that's an opportunity to learn what works and all improve. But those good days are fewer and further between than ever.

This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.

And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.

In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.

Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.

It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).

This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †

There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.

† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.

I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.

Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.

Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.

I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"

The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.

We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)

We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.

I mean cases where the state might decline to prosecute the politically powerful.

You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?

If you have a specific case you can just (well, I can't easily but a lawyer will know how without having to go re-read documentation they didn't look at for years) get the court records for that case and see what happened to it. The CPS claims they can't answer a FOIA "what happened to these cases?" type query because once the CPS owns the case it's just another case, but if you had a particular case in mind that's not a FOIA situation you just look at the court records.

From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com