Like to hear your opinion regarding evidence collection and management, and the legal decision in
There is a
I found the following rather surprising
In response, Detective Clifton testified that he preserved the conversation in the standard method he learned at the police department and that he compared the actual instant message “chat screens” to the word processing document he had created to ensure that they exactly matched and that he had accurately recorded the conversations in their entirety. He further testified that his preservation method was intended to conserve hard drive memory on his computer.
Were those really the standard methods for preserving instant messaging conversations in 2005, and were Miami Dade PD really so strapped for cash that they didn't have ample storage for what I can only presume were KBs or possibly MBs of chat logs? I'd only hope that they've improved their procedures for preserving such evidence in the intervening years.
I've had one worse than that where the detective was posing as someone else online and they didn't even know they could hit print screen and paste into a document, so they had NO trail of the conversation, only what they said happened.
The detective even neglected to turn on the save convo feature (which was available at the time of the alleged offense)
Judge said that sounded like they took appropriate steps to ensure the legitimacy of the evidence LOL