With the benefit of full knowledge, it’s an enormous difference. However, rewriting the two scenarios based on what the investigators can know, we get:
-he threw a knife in the ocean after the crime which may have had the victim’s blood on it
-he had a knife with the victim’s blood on it
Does this require evidence of intent? Or of some specific knowledge that the material is relevant to the investigation? Or merely knowledge that the investigation was happening at all.
Let’s go with the hit and run and deer blood scenario for a second. I have knowledge that a hit and run has happened. I have knowledge that the deer blood is not relevant, but reason to believe the cops may not think so. But I necessarily have knowledge that there is an ongoing investigation. There might be, or it might be already concluded, for instance if someone came in and confessed or they found the car with the victim’s blood on it. Your typical member of the public will have no idea what the progress of an investigation will be or how long it will take, or whether in fact the police will ever knock on their door and ask t examine their car. So how long is one supposed to wait to clean their car?
I’m gonna throw out a guess and say a “reasonable” length of time, which a zealous prosecutor will argue is a slightly longer time than this innocent suspect chose to wait.
Your lawyer can probably put up a good defense that it was deer blood that you finally got around to cleaning up, and just happened to coincide with a nearby hit and run that you weren’t involved in. Of course, that’s going to be part of the art of persuasion. What other evidence is there?
If you have a rock-solid alibi for the time of the hit and run, and happen to be finishing washing your car just as the cops come by, they decide maybe you were hiding evidence, well you can point at your alibi and probably not get charged.
If you have some reason to look guilty, the cops are already suspecting you, and then they find out you had a dent and blood on your car and washed it when you heard they were coming, that is going to make them more suspicious that what you did was cover up evidence.
It also depends on the nature of the evidence and other laws, such as businesses, records retention, and shredding files right before the cops drop by with their subpeona/warrant. People who have laws that they must keep certain records for a certain period of time who destroy those records prior to that time limit are going to be in trouble, whether or not those records actually pertain to another legal issue. Though it may not be discovered without that other legal issue.
But would that, in of itself, be a crime is the critical point. Yes, they are going to be a lot more suspicious of you when they walk in on you cleaning blood off your car. But could they prosecute you for destruction of evidence, even when the blood test results come back showing that it was in fact deer blood?
Would it matter how close or involved in the actual crime you were? Would the deer’s blood count as evidence if you hit the deer on the other side of town from the hit run? What about if it was across the street from the the hit and run ? What if you gave the actual hit and run driver a lift in your deer’s blood soaked car ? Or did the simple fact that the police thought it was evidence make it evidence ?
Obstruction of justice (destroying evidence) means you have to know it is wanted as evidence. Once a subpoena is served, or the police ask for something, destroying it is a crime.
I recall a case of a phone hacker arrested many years ago. While in police custody, the police left him alone in a room with his Radio Shack audio autodialer. (ah, technology) He removed the batteries, thus erasing the memory. The police charged him with destroying evidence, because he had erased a device that held evidence.
There’s a long list of such crimes, where the obstruction is easier to prove than the crime. (Watergate?) Martha Stewart was convicted of obstruction for erasing the computer log of her phone call from the broker when she heard about the investigation. She thought about it, and re-typed in the entry a little later; but she was convicted of obstruction, even though the entry was retyped. They never did convict her of insider trading, the original crime, because it was all circumstantial.
I think the key is obviously knowing that it is relevant evidence to an actual investigation when you destroy it. I’m thinking of some movie I saw where the corporate bigwigs have a room full of flunkies busy shredding stuff before the lawyer can arrive and tell them about a subpoena, at which point they have to stop.
That’s only half true. While she wasn’t convicted of the insider trading, she was found guilty of the conspiracy (to violate securities laws) as well as obstruction.
The other point is that the DA will charge you with anything and everything they think might have a hope of sticking (or even won’t) in the hope that faced with 3 life sentences you will deal on the charges that you just might be convicted.
(For example, Martha Stewart published full page ads claiming she was innocent. The charges laid against her after that included conspiracy to manipulate the price of her company’s stock; with the claim the purpose of the ads was to stop the slide in the price of her company’s stock. Fortunately the judge tossed that charge. )
The general rule of thumb nowadays is that once you attract the attention of the DA investigative team, they will find anything and everything the can to charge you with to justify the time and money spent investigating you - like a pit bull that refuses to let go.
I’m not sure how exactly relevant this case is, but former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had his whole staff somehow buy their computer hard drives from the Commonwealth when he left office. They contain all their work emails and who knows what else. Presumably this was done with an eye to protecting a future presidential candidacy and exploited the lack of specifics about computer records in existing laws.
It’s not clear yet if this will become a big deal but it looks both somewhat crafty on his part and risky (if perceived as a potential red flag about dirty tricks, or at least integrity).
I think the fact that you’re genuinely innocent is being overlooked. The bloody knife is not evidence of who committed the crime. It is actually something that would lead the police into wasting their time investigating you instead of looking for the real murderer. The bloody knife is essentially anti-evidence and its destruction will theoretically make the investigation easier by eliminating a false lead.
I’m not a cop or a lawyer, so take it for what it’s worth. If they catch you in the act but have enough to test, then they may eventually drop charges when they find out it really is deer blood. But if they find you just afterwards, there is no blood left to test, but they have a dented car and a hose, that suggests you were destroying evidence. So if you don’t have an alibi, then they may elect to arrest you on destroying evidence while they try to find more proof you did the hit and run.
All the police need to arrest you is reasonable evidence that you committed a crime. Finding you hosing down a car that has a dent in the front right after a hit and run is suspicious. Is it enough for a DA to prosecute? Enough for a judge not to throw it out?
Let me see if I grasp the distinction. You are not actually guilty of a crime by destroying non-evidence of a crime. However, the cops may believe you are guilty of a crime for destroying what they think might be evidence.
Of course, as I said, sometimes tampering with records or whatnot is itself a crime, even if the records do not show any criminal activity. If there are laws about the recordkeeping, then violating those laws is a crime.
Well, the police have to act on what they think happened. So if they think you destroyed evidence of a crime, they will try to arrest you for that. Assuming they can prove you did something that could have been destroying evidence, like washing blood off your car, or they have a witness who saw you throwing a knife in the lake, but don’t have the knife.
That’s the thing, though, what is the basis of the charge? Suppose in the bloody knife situation, they arrest you for destroying evidence and are busy trying to solidify evidence that you were the murderer, only suddenly they find the real killer with his bloody knife and a confession. Now they realize that even though you threw away a knife, it had no bearing on their case. What is the DA going to do? Is he going to waste time prosecuting a case that the jury is likely to go “WTF? He threw away a knife that had nothing to do with the murder.” They might have you on littering, but that’s about it.
Could they decide to charge you anyway? Well, I suppose so, but it’s going to be a hard case for them because they have to prove that you knowingly took an action to hamper their investigation. But you didn’t intentionally hamper their investigation. The only hampering was the witness seeing you dispose of a knife. If they hadn’t known about the knife, then they wouldn’t have been looking at you so much. Their awareness of the action is independent of your intent with the action.
Well you could argue that it is all evidence, even if it’s not evidence of your guilt. You could even say that a car covered in deers blood is in fact evidence of your INNOCENCE hence destroying it is a crime.
A car covered in deer blood isn’t evidence of your innocence. You could have run over a deer and committed murder. Evidence of your innocence would be something like a security tape showing you were buying cigarettes in a 7-11 on the other side of town when the crime was committed.
But the investigators don’t know it’s not evidence if you destroy it.
But YOU don’t get to decide it’s “wasting their time”. That was my point about not being allowed to be your own judge.
From the investigator’s POV, what they have is potential evidence that no longer exists because a potential suspect decided it was better not to waste police resources by destroying that evidence.
Why try to be a backseat driver and “help” the police out by destroying evidence? Let them do the job they were trained to do.
That was my point. The investigators have to work with what they think. So they may charge you with a crime. So not only could they charge you with the hit and run, they could charge you with destroying evidence.
But as I said, the burden of proof is on them to make their case. Can they prove what you did was destroy evidence? Your argument is that you previously hit a deer. Well, that’s a story - can you corroborate that in any way?
You see, it comes down to who can convince the jury. I don’t think they’re going to prosecute you for destroying evidence without also trying to go after you for the hit and run, they’re going to use the one as part of their argument for the second. But that’s a specific example. Other examples they have in fact prosecuted for a lesser crime because they couldn’t get the one they wanted. Think Al Capone.
So even if they charge you and prosecute you for destroying evidence, they still haven’t convicted you. You may yet be “not guilty” by convincing the jury that the truth is you hit a deer.
If you can convince the investigators (police, DA) that what you did was unrelated to their case, they won’t prosecute you for destroying non-evidence. But if you can’t convince them it was unrelated, then they may feel you did destroy evidence, and go after you for that. Whether what you destroyed actually was evidence or not.
it’s all about what the investigators know or think they know. If they think you are guilty, they will be trying to find evidence to support prosecuting you. And they may interpret things to suit that conclusion, when there are other explanations. That’s the way reality works.
Are you guilty of destroying evidence? No. Can they think you’re guilty? Yes. And they may prosecute you for what they think you did, even if you didn’t actually do it. That includes destroying evidence.
Their job performance is measured in crimes closed and convictions, not crimes solved. The ONLY reason they’ll want to impound my bloody car is to make an arrest on their hit-and-run. The car is evidence of the deer accident, not evidence of the pedestrian crime and absolutely nothing good will come from my cooperation.
I armchair-attorney that the washing is not crime.
Usually these obstruction of justice prosecutions happen when the prosecution believes that you committed a crime. Either they are having trouble building a case against you and so want to add a more easily proved obstruction charge, or they have a good case and just want to pile on more charges to improve their plea bargain, or they think you helped the real perpetrator.
If the prosecution becomes convinced that you are actually innocent because they’ve arrested some other guy, and they don’t think you’re his accomplice, then they aren’t going to bother prosecuting you.
But if they think you really committed the main crime, but can’t prove it, but can prove that you destroyed what might have been evidence, then they’re very likely to try to nail you, and you’d have to defend yourself in court by arguing that the evidence you destroyed wasn’t really evidence of a crime, and a jury would have to believe you. And since the evidence is now destroyed, because you destroyed it, it seems reasonable to believe that you destroyed the evidence because you really were guilty.
You have to accept the premise. Which in this case is that I am completely innocent of any crime. So any evidence that points to my guilt is false. So how does it help the police to give them what I know is false evidence?
Is this one of those need ansewer fast threads, lol.
Declan
But how, at your trial for destroying evidence, are you going to convince the jury that you didn’t really destroy evidence? Because the evidence you would have used to show your innocence is what you destroyed.
If the jury believed you that what you destroyed wasn’t really evidence, then you walk away. Except, will they believe you?