We cant seem to get the answer yet but can anybody here offer anything
If the Police only have 96 hrs in which to charge or N.F.A. ( no further action ) unless there is new evidence, what constitutes "new" evidence.
If someone has been arrested and as part of the enquiry they have had their phone seized I know it is taking a lot of people more than four days to examine and report back.
If there were damning evidence on the phone and it was examined on day five is the "new" after all its not the defendants fault the phone has a delay on the examination.
I have around 50 in my office catalogued and awaiting examination.
Please outsourcers dont answer by stating "we return them within 24hrs" cos we know that this is not done except for exceptional circumstances
One last thing consider the poor officer who -miraculously- has had his exhibit iphone 4 examined after just two days…….but its 10,660 pages long cry
Some devil's advocate observations you may have to contend with.
Please outsourcers dont answer by stating "we return them within 24hrs" cos we know that this is not done except for exceptional circumstances
bigjon, you may need to take account of the difference between submission time and return time delays as opposed to actually examining an exhibit. According to the police approach for outsourcer contracts it should only take x-number of hours to examine eg a handset/SIM. Not every interviewee has a difficult handset/SIM and not every handset requires running physical dumps.
Of those handsets/SIMs that maybe complex there are only a selected number of those where days not hours just 'might be' relevant for examination.
You'll perhaps need to clarify that the examination in itself is an issue; particularly with outsourcer contracts that base the payment system for examinations on x-number of hours work.
One last thing consider the poor officer who -miraculously- has had his exhibit iphone 4 examined after just two days…….but its 10,660 pages long cry
bigjon, this could be seen as crossing boundaries here? The page count issue has nothing to do with mobile phone examination but other activities associated with the police investigation.
For what its worth
Essentially "new" is a definition issue, rather than a phone forensics question. I think you could argue that if it takes 95hrs to find the new evidence on the phone then it is still new and justifies further action in a prosecution case even if it took a while to achieve.
You could argue that the investigators were not being 'expeditious' by taking this long to find the evidence on a phone (which has been in their possession for all this time), but the discovery is still 'new' once you have recovered and identified it…however long it takes.
I guess ultimately its for the court to decide whether this is an abuse of process - provided you did the best you can in the circumstances with the resources available to you - that's all anyone could hope for.