Digital Evidence in the Courtroom: A Guide for Law Enforcement and Prosecutors
National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice · January 2007 · 2007
Identifier: NCJ 211314
Access and status
Cost
Free
Free to read or download at source. No account, no purchase.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
An 81-page NIJ guide on the legal handling of digital evidence: search and seizure issues including the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act; maintaining evidence integrity; pretrial preparation including authentication and hearsay; courtroom presentation and expert testimony; and a chapter on child pornography cases. Appendices include consent forms and evidence return stipulations.
Who it is for, and when
The bridge document for the examiner who has to explain their work to a prosecutor, and for the prosecutor who has to get it admitted. The pretrial chapter on scope review and examiner-prosecutor communication describes failures that still recur, and the courtroom chapter is a workable checklist for preparing technical testimony for a lay jury.
What it does not cover
It is US criminal practice and is written from the prosecution side; it gives no civil, eDiscovery or non-US guidance and no defence perspective. Written in 2007, it predates two decades of case law on cell-site data, device searches at the border, warrant particularity for digital devices and provider-held cloud data — treat every legal proposition in it as needing a current check.
Go to the source
Open at ojp.gov (opens in a new tab)https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/digital-evidence-courtroom-guide-law-enforcement-and-prosecutors
Details
- Type
- Standard or guidance
- Written for
- Lawyers and courtsLawyers and courts
- Publisher
- National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice
- Version verified
- January 2007
- Year
- 2007
- Identifier
- NCJ 211314
- Topics
- legal-admissibility, expert-testimony, reporting, chain-of-custody, us-federal
- Checked at source
- Standards are revised. Confirm the current revision with the publisher before citing this.
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