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Hear the truth.We are Jill Canvin and George Hibbert. As a solicitor and a doctor, we know that many people, like us, feel that they live in a world in which they feel deceived, confused and helpless. The truth is often hidden by powerful people who want to keep it that way, causing destructive conspiracy theories, suspicion and lack of trust. In our podcasts we interview experts with integrity and expertise who lift the lid and explain in plain terms what is happening in the world that they know about. Join us in our search for truth. Let us help you gain confidence and insight into what is really happening in hidden parts of society.You can help us by subscribing, commenting and sharing our podcasts.We are continuing to help those with overwhelming difficulties to get heard and receive justice with the ONRECORD web and mobile apps (https://myonrecord.com) which makes it easy to gather evidence and make your case.
There are many unfair incentives that create pressure for people, including innocent people, to plead guilty. The Post Office scandal has thrown up many examples. Dr Rebecca Helm explains the current false assumptions relating to choice in the guilty plea system, the inadequacy of assuming that defendants have autonomy when deciding to plead guilty and suggests ways of improving the situation.
Read the full discussion in: Guilty Plea Decisions: Moving Beyond the Autonomy Myth by Rebecca K. Helm, Roxanna Dehaghani and Daniel Newman; 2022 - The Modern Law Review - Wiley Online Library: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-2230.12676
Dr Helm is the Director of the University of Exeter Evidence Based Justice Lab. Her research interest for the past decade has been on why people plead guilty in England and Wales and the USA. Nobody knows more about the injustices that the pressure to plead guilty can lead to.
Rebecca has created The Evidence Based Justice Lab (https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/) to collate and study the patterns of behaviour in the justice system, iincluding miscarriages of justice in the UK.
Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Exeter University, a Supervising Solicitor in the Law Clinic, and a UK Research and Innovation Fellow. She has a PhD in Law and Developmental Psychology and a Masters in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University, a Masters in Law from Cornell University Law School, and a BA in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford. She is a qualified solicitor in England and Wales and Attorney in New York state, USA.
Just how corrupt is the UK's financial sector? How much are the government and those who should be regulating financial services, involved in this corruption and its cover-up? How does the corruption of the UK's financial services affect those that try to create or grow businesses and the ordinary citizen? What are the political implications of the pervasive patterns of corruption and cover-up?
Ian Fraser is an award-winning journalist, commentator and broadcaster who writes about business, finance, politics and economics. He has written for titles including The Economist, Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Independent on Sunday, the Herald, Sunday Herald, BBC News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Accountancy, CA Magazine and Citywire.
His book, 'Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain', has also been described as the “definitive account” of Royal Bank of Scotland’s collapse, one of the five best books on the global financial crisis, “a model of the journalist’s craft“, and “hard to put down at any point“.
The courts have a naive faith in computer evidence, based in ignorance. Since the repeal of the section of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act which required certification that computer systems were functioning correctly, a presumption has been adopted by the courts of England and Wales that they simply do, without the need for any certification to confirm it and is therefore admissible as evidence.
This presumption formed the basis for the criminal prosecutions and civil actions against subpostmasters who were consequently put in the position of having to prove their innocence with no need by the Post Office to prove that Horizon, full of bugs as it was, was functioning properly.
This resulted in the hundreds of miscarriages of justice caused to subpostmasters and the ruin of many lives
Steven Murdoch is Professor of Security Engineering and Royal Society Research Fellow at University College London. He is Innovation Security Architect at OneSpan. He explains how wrong this presumption is, how ignorant the courts and lawyers are and how laughable IT specialists consider this presumption to be.