Digital Evidence Case Study

Introduction

What is digital evidence?

Digital evidence is any information in a digital form stored or transmitted that can be used at trial to a court case. The court will determine the relevancy and authenticity of the digital evidence before accepting it. But there can arise many problems regarding it. The information stored by computer or generated by it can be difficult to comprehend with respect to legal proceedings. A potential risk is there to manage digital evidence as electronic data can be easily modified or destroyed.

When any evidence brought to court is in electronic form, a strategy should be drawn by the prosecution beyond all reasonable doubt to prove that the defendant is guilty of crime.

General considerations for the evidence:

This rule is been made basically to deal with the concerns regarding to the reliability of the evidence which might have been garbled in the process of transmission or there might be a situation where the individual making the statement cannot be tested by the defendant.

If any electronic data is produced automatically and not manually then it will be treated as real evidence. If the output data is manual, i.e handled by a human then the evidence falls under hearsay. Hence if computer records are been produced without the intervention of any human being then that can be considered as evidence for litigation. A very good example that can describe it better is the case of R v. Wood in 1982 where the weight of a person is taken by a machine where the person reads out the weight and then the machine prints it out for him, none of it will be taken as hearsay evidence. As the person standing on the weighing machine, the witness has to be cross examined as whether he kept both of his feet or just one foot on the machine. Also the accuracy of the machine is required to be

The act Criminal Evidence Act 1992 Is to create an exception with respect to certain business records which presume that they are reliable even though hearsay. But this act was not drafted for the computer evidence. So it does not deal with questions like if a computer is operating properly in a given period

A provision exists which is relevant to show that “in the case of information in non-legible form that has been reproduced in permanent legible form, [it] was reproduced in the course of the normal operation of the reproduction system concerned”. Here it focuses nly on the print out information and not the acquisition made by the information. So this act is of no help to decide whether the information captured is admissible as the functioning should be normal while the information was captured.

It is also important to note that this act is limited to criminal evidence. Well, in practice the parties in litigation do not strict to the hearsay rule and can us ways to trip up the unwary