United States v. Browne
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2016
- Citation
- 834 F.3d 403 (3d Cir. 2016)
- Standard applied
- FRE 104(b), 901, 902(11) — preponderance sufficiency for authorship
What the court held
A platform records custodian's certificate under Rule 902(11) did not by itself authenticate Facebook chat logs, because the custodian attested only that the communications occurred between the named accounts — not that the defendant authored them. The records were nonetheless properly admitted because the government introduced ample extrinsic evidence from which a jury could reasonably find authorship by a preponderance.
Why
The court located the question in Rule 104(b): where relevance depends on a conditional fact, the proponent must produce evidence sufficient for a jury to find that fact by a preponderance. Because the relevance of the Facebook records turned on who wrote them, the business-records certification — which speaks to how the platform keeps its records, not to authorship — could not close the gap. Corroborating testimony and circumstances tying the defendant to the account supplied what the certificate could not.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
This is the most important distinction in platform-records practice and the one most often collapsed: a Rule 902(11) or 902(13) certification authenticates the record as the platform's record, not the human being behind the account. An examiner who returns a subpoena response from a provider has proved the account's activity and nothing about attribution, so the attribution evidence has to be built separately. Read Browne alongside Mangel and Koch, which are the same point reached from the losing side.
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: Facebook · Rule 902(11) · records custodian · authorship
Cited 66times 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.