Commonwealth v. Purdy
- Court
- Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (State high court)
- Decided
- 2011
- Citation
- 459 Mass. 442 (2011)
- Standard applied
- Mass. G. Evid. § 901 — authorship by circumstantial evidence
What the court held
E-mail exchanges recovered from a computer the defendant admitted owning, and for which he supplied all the passwords, were sufficiently authenticated as his, absent persuasive evidence of fraud, tampering or hacking. The court held that the mere fact a message bears a person's name, or comes from an e-mail or social-networking account bearing that name, is not by itself enough to authenticate it as that person's.
Why
The court reasoned by analogy to telephone calls and letters: a caller's or writer's self-identification is not sufficient authentication, but a reply-letter pattern or other confirming circumstances will do. Applying the same basic principles to e-mail, it found the location of the messages on the defendant's own password-protected machine, plus corroborating content including an attached photograph of him, sufficient. It added that the possibility of alteration cannot be a ground for excluding e-mail as a matter of course any more than for paper.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Purdy is the case that states both halves of the rule a practitioner needs: account naming alone proves nothing, and custody of the machine plus content corroboration usually proves enough. The footnoted distinction is worth noting too — if the messages are offered to show what was received rather than who wrote them, authorship need not be established at all, only that the exhibit accurately reproduces what the account sent and received. That reframing sometimes rescues an exhibit that cannot be attributed.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: e-mail · authorship · reply-letter rule · password protection
Cited 93times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on authentication
- Tienda v. StateCourt of Criminal Appeals of Texas · 2012The court affirmed the admission of printouts from MySpace profiles attributed to the defendant, holding that the internal content of the pages — photographs, r…
- People v. GoldsmithCalifornia Supreme Court · 2014Photographs and video from an automated traffic-enforcement system were adequately authenticated by the testimony of an investigating officer, and were not hear…
- United States v. HassanCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · 2014Screenshots of Facebook pages and YouTube videos were self-authenticating as business records under Rule 902(11), supported by certifications from the platforms…
- Lorraine v. Markel American Insurance Co.District Court, D. Maryland · 2007Neither party's electronic exhibits could be considered because none was authenticated: e-mails were simply attached to the motions rather than supported by aff…
- United States v. VaynerCourt of Appeals for the Second Circuit · 2014A printout of a profile page from a Russian social-networking site was admitted without adequate authentication under Rule 901, because the government offered n…
- Commonwealth v. KochSupreme Court of Pennsylvania · 2014An evenly divided Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed by operation of law the Superior Court's holding that drug-sales text messages recovered from the defen…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.