Watch fully all 4 days of his evidence before making your mind up on Gareth Jenkins.
I've watched in entirety all 4 days including his own Lawyers questions. Dont rely on "highlights" extracts seen elsewhere as these select the most lurid parts, especially today when most seem to concentrate on questions from the lawyer of Seema Misra and definitely give a false impression of the evidence presented. The lawyer attempted to paint a picture of Gareth Jenkins as the devil incarnate, which was not borne out by the full 4 days of evidence. The press is almost as bad.
Gareth Jenkins has been reported as Systems Architect for Horizon and named in evidence by one witness as such earlier in the Enquiry. It would appear he was not when asked very early on in his evidence.
The impression I got overall was that the courts were led to believe that he was an Expert Witness in the legal sense whereas he genuinely believed he was there to provide his extensive expert knowledge in both of the Horizon Systems, not the same thing at all.
Gareth Jenkins is an IT person not a legally trained person and apparently worked for ICL/Fujitsu all his working life. Court work, after he was thrust into it, was less than 10% of his work and not really part of his job. Not legally trained in any way he appears to have been thrust into the legal role with absolutely no training whilst also fully continuing with his day to day responsibilities. One of his day 3 comments about how he was glad to be relieved of these legal duties and get back to his day job was very revealing. I can well believe the early day one comments about not remembering that he had had a letter about duties as a witness - very convenient that the enquiry found overnight between day one and two a slightly different piece of evidence that they must have had for some time regarding that letter. It was later explained there was a gap between getting the letter (as an email attachment) and actually providing input to any legal work and so very likely to be forgotten about by him. The Legally trained people would know very well what an "Expert Witness" meant in legal terms but in my opinion they should have ensured that he fully understood what that means and have got him to say in writing that he fully understood the difference between an Expert Witness in legal terms and a witness with expertise in the Horizon system rather than just supply a letter. I can well belive he thought he was just delivering information/evidence for others to apply to their legal arguments.
Most of his work for the trials was to analyse logs, both hardware and software, to find errors, and also to see if any known bugs could have affected the branch in question (some known bugs still extant were shown to only affect branches with certain configurations and not apply to most post office branches). He appears to have performed this work diligently and honestly in as far as he was allowed to do so, often at short notice. The Post Office refused to allow him to perform an analysis over as much data as he would have liked in at least one case as they were not prepared to pay for more of his time and would ask for his help directly rather than go through the proper routes, which he resisted. He suggested longer period of logs should be examined but was not allowed to do this and he did report this in some of the statements to the court usually embedded in other authors documents, which they (not he) signed as expert witness. He maintained that he provided information for others to use. He certainly seemed naive regarding the legal niceties and his guiding principle (and legal advice from managers at Fujitsu when he asked for clarification) was "tell the truth" which he repeatedly insisted he did as he saw it. He admitted that based on what he now knows rather than what he knew then he would have done things differently. Look on the day 4 evidence for what he thought Fujitsu could hve done better.
From evidence and questions on day 3 Jason Beer appeared to be saying that Bugs in Horizon Online needed to be disclosed in the Seema Misra trial when that trial was from a time when Legacy Horizon was in use. If that is true then, as Gareth Jenkins said, it makes no logical sense that bugs in a different system needed to be disclosed just because the new system was also called Horizon. Also It would seem to a logical person that any bugs fixed in Legacy Horizon before the relevant date would not need to be disclosed as the system would not have those bugs, only that bugs known to be extant at the relevant period would need be disclosed and even then they could be shown not to be relevant.I got the impression that even bugs found in testing and killed before go live should have been disclosed! Some of the lawyers seemed to confuse Legacy horizon and Horizon Online and did bring up bugs found in testing before go live as being relevant to their clients cases.
This is not to say that just looking at transactions and error logs is necessarily sufficient to show the system was working correctly (or not) at the relevant times, possible bugs need to be taken into account. The Post Office should have carried out or caused to be carried out more detailed analyses before court cases.
The comment by Gareth Jenkins early on that Robust does not mean Infallible is the first time I have heard anyone qualify what Robust meant - I am convinced that some people did indeed equate it with infallible.
My understanding is that in England and Wales, courts consider computers, as a matter of law, to have been working correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary and a court will treat evidence from a computer being correct as it is assumed to be working perfectly unless someone can convincingly show why that is not the case!. This also applies to Horizon as a whole and this could explain a lot of the legal attitudes. The defence needs to rebut this assumption which is very difficult and costly for them.
I can believe Gareth Jenkins did not fully understand his role and he could have done a far better job but had more excuses than so the legal teams with all their training.
Many of those found guilty did plead guilty to false accounting and so were found guilty by the courts. That the Post Office forced the sub postmasters under extreme duress into committing false accounting by them having to sign off accounts as true before they could continue trading and not allow them to place disputed discrepancies in supense accounts until they could be resolved (they had a system change made to tighten this up) AND make them pay up immediately as they were responsible for any percieved shortfall was nothing short of disgraceful.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
