Griffin v. State
- Court
- Court of Appeals of Maryland (State high court)
- Decided
- 2011
- Citation
- 419 Md. 343, 19 A.3d 415 (2011)
- Standard applied
- Md. Rule 5-901 — authentication of social-networking printouts
What the court held
Pages printed from a MySpace profile said to belong to the defendant's girlfriend, and offered to show she had threatened a witness, were not properly authenticated. A lead investigator's testimony that the profile contained a photograph resembling her, her birth date, her home town and a reference to the defendant's nickname was not a sufficient basis to find that she created the profile or wrote the post.
Why
The court emphasised that anyone can create a profile at no cost and that the State never asked the girlfriend about the pages when she testified. The concern was not that the printout misrepresented the page but that nothing established whose page it was or who authored the post. The court suggested routes that would have worked, including asking the purported author, examining the computer's internet history and hard drive, or obtaining information directly from the platform.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Griffin is the canonical exclusion case for social-media evidence and the source of the three-route roadmap practitioners still use: ask the author, examine the device, or subpoena the platform. Placed next to Tienda it shows that the outcome depends on whether the content contains something only the account holder would know. The practical instruction for an examiner is to treat a screenshot as the beginning of the work — device history and platform records are what convert it into admissible evidence.
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: MySpace · social media · screenshot · authorship
Cited 45times 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. PurdyMassachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · 2011E-mail exchanges recovered from a computer the defendant admitted owning, and for which he supplied all the passwords, were sufficiently authenticated as his, a…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.