Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch

An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

Comments

If they'd been using

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice, would it be news here?

Re:If they'd been using

[qbast]

Sure. Judge actually using OpenOffice would be newsworthy here.

Re:If they'd been using

[TheRaven64]

Correct. If they'd been using OpenOffice.org, they'd have turned off the change tracking feature in disgust after the third time the computer paused for several seconds while making a minor edit and gone back to making a secretary manually merge the documents.

I've never used this feature in MS Office, so I don't know if it's any better, but it's an absolute disaster in OO.o. So bad, in fact, that the last project I was on, they decided to move to LaTeX for the next version because change management is easier and they decided the time spent learning LaTeX would be less than the time wasted with OO.o.

Re:If they'd been using

[ozmanjusri]

I use this in Open Office all the time without problems.

What version were you using, and was it with Word or ODF documents?

2000 pages...

[geogob]

But who would ever think of using word to typeset a 2000 page document build from multiple sources. All my experiences with MS Word tell me that this is going to be a nightmare how ever you try to do it and what ever the content of the document is.

Re:2000 pages...

[erroneus]

Work Perfect had it about right and this is part of the reason why those who operate in the legal community stayed with Word Perfect for as long as they could. Formatting in legal documents simply must be precise. Work Perfect allowed "low level" editing of formats to prevent that from happening.

On an almost regular basis, I have MS Word users dealing with company documents working with a particular template who, for inexplicable reasons end up with an extra page in the document so that a 5 page document says "page 5 of 6" in the header. For whatever reason, though, when the blank page gets removed, the formatting disappears with it and the whole template formatting is destroyed.

One might argue "the template is wrong" or that the user is doing it wrong somehow. Either of these may be true, but the fact is, they are unable to correct the errors just by looking at them because strange and unexpected things happen when different things are inserted and deleted.

In any case, Word Perfect has historically manages Word Perfect documents of all sizes without much trouble.

Re:2000 pages...

[cptdondo]

It's "Hang, draw, and quarter". They would "hang" you but not drop you as they do in modern times, so your neck would not break, and presumably you would still be somewhat alive after hanging. Then they would "draw" you - take you down, and then they would tie each limb to a horse, and have the horses pull you apart. That's the "quarter" part. Sometimes they would cut the sinews in your hips and shoulders to make it easier for the horses to pull you apart.

Somewhat akin to working with word, but less painful.

Re:2000 pages...

[nanoakron]

No, no - it's even nicer than that.

Hang - As you say, hanged by the neck until loss of consciousness but still alive.
Draw - Then they'd wake you back up by cutting into your abdomen and pulling out your intestines. Occasionally, for added fun, they'd burn them in front of you on an open brazier.
Quarter - As you say, pulled apart by 4 strong cart horses.

Lovely people.

Look up 'broken on the wheel' for truly awful torture.

It's a conspiracy

[antifoidulus]

turns out clippy was working for pedobear this whole time! Or maybe... come to think of it I never have actually seen clippy and pedobear in the same place at the same time....

Re:It's a conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

for some reason, gis on pedobear and clippy comes out with this:

http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/msft-clippy.jpg

sfw

Re:It's a conspiracy

[kainosnous]

Clippy: I see that you are writing a ruling. Would you like me to show you the EULA where we already own your ruling through Microsoft's substantial control of the legal system?

Microsoft WORD?

[JambisJubilee]

I was surprised when I heard this was related to Microsoft Word. Don't most lawyers use Wordperfect?

Re:Microsoft WORD?

[erroneus]

He's right about that. Legal offices are the last holdouts on Word Perfect. The formatting is quite precise and predictable. Legal office workers are quite adept at editing with WP's "show codes" mode to ensure than everything is formatted exactly and correctly. While I believe it is true that MS Word also offers a feature like this, I'm not sure that people actually use it... or know how to for that matter.

Gross oversimplification

[Arrepiadd]

Putting this on Slashdot without giving more the info on this case (which would have very hard) is prone to disaster.

This has been the longest running case in Portuguese justice and has been full of stupid decision since day one. When this whole thing blew up (6 years ago or so) a few of the key people on the process were arrested and put in jail while the investigation was going. The theory was that there was the danger they would flee the country. Some were left there for the maximum time they can be arrested before a trial, while others after several months in jail were released and no charges were made against them (so maybe they shouldn't have been put in jail in the first place). From the ones that were put in jail and later released, none fled the country. So the first decision on this process was already a mess and a good start for the entire thing.

The trial was huge and went on for 6 years,the longest even in Portugal. There were 900 witnesses, 7 lawyers for the defendants and also the prosecutors. Since every one of these lawyers and the prosecutors has the right to talk to the witnesses this leads to about 7000 cross-interrogations. Whatever can be taken from 900 people and not summarized by 50 or 100 people (remember, this is a case about child-abuse, not country-wide rigging of elections or whatever) is still to be understood.

The victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all. They couldn't be precise on dates on when things happened, on places where things happened, on people present. It gets to the point of one supposed places where the abuses happened is described not by the exact address but by "an apartment with an odd door number on street [whatever]" (in Portugal buildings on one side of the street have odd numbers, on the other side even, so in practice they were just able to say we enter a building on this side of the street). One guy is accused of abusing a boy but the time span is described as "on the second trimester of year XXXX". I wonder how many of us could provide a solid alibi spanning 3 months... I'm not trying to defend no one here, but there were, but as far as we get to know, there was no clear solid evidence to anything. There aren't even phone calls between the abusers and the supposed ring leaders or anyone involved. People abuse other people for years and no phone call is ever made to set up any meetings and so on.

Now going to the decision itself, it was supposed to be read in June, later postponed to July due to lack of time to write it and then to September (there are "judicial holidays" in August in Portugal) as they still had no time to finish it. When the day of presenting it finally came, they attorneys were not given the decision by the judges, as it still had to be finalized. All sentences in Portugal are presented to the defendant when the paperwork is already on the Ministery of Justice system and can be accessed right away (to start preparing for appeals and so on). Not this one, because it was too big, with 2000 pages, and it had still to be finalized. The date of presenting the decision was Sep 3, the date of finally having the paper work was then said to be the Sep 8. That day came and things were postponed one day because there was a problem with the making of the PDF due to the size of the document. Next day it was postponed again to the 10th and it was a problem with the printer, generically described as a "computer problem", common nowadays when things go south. Friday by the middle of the afternoon the news came out everything will be finished by Monday. And yesterday there was this piece in the same newspaper as presented above:
Delay due to virus (Only in Portuguese, google translate should be as good as before)
So the reason has been changing with time and the most likely reason is the judges' inability to finish the thing on time (not wanting to go into the lack of skills vs lack of t

Re:Gross oversimplification

[oldmac31310]

Thanks for that concise clarification. Now back to ragging on Word!

Re:Gross oversimplification

[GreatBunzinni]

Your report of this whole mess is terribly uninformed and one-sided. Let me add a few details which are fundamental to understanding this case:

For example, you claimed that the reason behind placing the key suspects in preventative jail terms was to prevent them fleeing the country. What you opted to omit was the fact that there was the impending danger that if they remained free they would try their best to tamper with the investigation, either by tampering witnesses, destroying evidence and conspire with the remaining criminal network to corrupt and derail the judicial process. That's the reason behind the decision to lock them out while the investigation was ongoing. Yet, even though the judges ordered the arrest of the main suspects, they still managed to tamper with the investigation. One example was how Inês Serra Lopes, a journalist which also happened to be the daughter of an attorney defending the main suspect, was caught planting evidence exonerating her father's client.

Then, that which you describe as "the victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all" is a deceitful description of the whole process. I'll point it out to you that this was a child abuse case, where the suspects were charged with the crimes of sexually abusing children between the age of 10 and 14 years old. There were over 30 reported victims, all of which were proven to have been sexually molested through multiple forensic tests. Then, what you describe as "failed to offer clear evidence" was small nit-picking details such as asking a then 10 year old boy the exact day, hour and minute he was sexually abused by suspect X, something which happened over 10 years ago. Besides that, although there were 30 victims and the suspects were accused of committing hundreds of crimes, only a hand full were considered to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to which it also contributed the fact that one suspect confessed to the crimes and implicated all the other suspects, something which you conveniently omitted.

Your post has far more deceitful or simply uninformed bits but I believe these facts I've pointed out are enough to get a clear picture of the case.

Re:What is wrong with these people?

[TheRaven64]

To clarify this point: Read TF PDF spec. The format was designed from the start to be alterable. It starts with a list of objects. The end of the file contains a linked list of dictionaries of objects, giving their locations in the file. You can edit a PDF, preserving all previous versions, simply by appending some new objects, a new dictionary that references these with a higher version number, and links back to the previous dictionary. The nice thing about this design is that you can update a PDF without overwriting anything, just by appending. You can then compact the PDF in a separate step, removing unreferenced objects and writing a single dictionary.

Re:To show codes in Word 2007, use OOXML.

[ColdWetDog]

...saving your document in Office 2007 format, opening the document as a zipfile, and seeing the OOXML files.

Thanks for that tip. Only slightly less painful than using a hex editor. Or poking your eyes out.

Office automation at it's finest.

Re:The solution

[ColdWetDog]

In most situations, when you can't get rid of unwanted text that's sticky in word, do : CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+N, CTRL+V

That's funny, I thought it was UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A.

No wonder nothing happened. I'll try your sequence later today.

Re:Insane!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Portuguese too and I am not surprised at all. A couple of years ago, I was accused of an IT related crime. When I went to be heard by the judge, the first thing she tells me is: "I know nothing of computers, for me they are just typewriters".

Then, under a pile of nerves, I had to explain to her what a server is, the meaning of uploading and downloading files, the difference between a website and a file hosted in a server, among several other basic stuff, dead worried that she would understand something wrong and recommend some jail time for me... Luckily, the charges were dropped later on.

Judges learning LaTeX? Not gonna happen any time soon, I'm afraid...

Re:This takes a specialist?

[TangoMargarine]

Congratulations, you've just completely destroyed any kind of formatting more complicated than Tab and Newline. Other than that, yes, it works like a charm.