Governments around the world are run by the tech illiterate. Despite the fact that over 90 percent of Americans use the internet, government officials are still very much at the “can’t rotate pdf” level of tech understanding. If you really need proof, look no further than the embarrassing questions that Congress threw at Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, which ranged from “how do I get this chocolate ad to go away” to “Google’s the same thing as iPhone, right?” 

Seeing these stories may be darkly comedic, but there are human consequences to governments around the world being run by people who lost their virginity during the Carter administration. No one knows this better than Chandanji Thakor, a man in India who was, until recently, serving a life sentence for murder.

In 2020, Thakor had his conviction suspended by the Gujarat High Court. Good news, right? Thakor was about to be a free man! However, when jail authorities were sent an email detailing all of the information about his release, they couldn’t figure out how to open the attachment. And so, they waited. And waited. And waited. For three dang years. All the while, neither Thakor nor his lawyer had any idea that he was supposed to be released.

Early on, attempts were made by the High Court to rectify this. Several months after the original email, the Gujarat High Court registry sent a sort of “hey just checking in on this” email to the jail. The jail says they overlooked it. Sorry, Thakor — guess they should have marked it as “urgent.”

Eventually, the 27-year-old Thakor was released and given an official “we’re really sorry about all this” from the Gujarat High Court in the form of 100,000 rupees, equal to about $1,200 USD. The worst part? Given just how much of official court business was handled over email during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a chance that there are others who are currently in the same position.

The High Court has since directed the district legal service authorities (DLSA) to go back through their records and figure out if Thakor was the only one to whom this happened — a very nice way to say “please actually read your email, this is important.”

Let’s just hope Thakor was the only one, and that no one else’s “not guilty” verdict got inadvertently routed into a spam folder.