I’ve been watching reruns of To Catch A Predator and in the comments on YouTube someone said that some of the suspects had secured a Not Guilty verdict because their defense lawyers had successfully argued that there was no secure chain of custody for the chatlogs, which were crucial to the prosecution. One lawyer apparently suggested that Perverted Justice had altered the chatlog for his client to make it appear that it was he who had first approached the decoy rather than the other way round.
My question is what constitutes the chain of custody? From watching the programs it seems that the chatlogs are handed to the police at the same time as the suspects are arrested leaving the decoy house. I was under the impression that the chain of custody began when police actually received the evidence but what may be muddying the waters is that in some of the shows Perverted Justice representatives were deputized as state laws required an actual police presence during the chat.
The commenter argued that many more of the men could have escaped conviction had they retained a good counselor rather than a PD and taken their case to a jury.
Is this as solid a defense argument as the commenter suggests or is this just wily lawyers befuddling a jury (in which case shouldn’t the judge have stepped in and directed them as to the law?)
“Chain of custody” is basically, “where has this item of evidence been, and who has handled it, before it came into the courtroom today?” Ideally, you’d be able to produce every person who handled an item of evidence and have them available in the courtroom to testify that the item present is in the same condition as when they first observed it, at least in all material respects.
For pieces of physical evidence, preferably the evidence will be first photographed, then seized by one officer of the investigating agency, taken immediately by him to the evidence room of his agency, and locked up in an evidence locker with a secure key. At our PD, only the chief and the officer who locked up the evidence will be able to open that locker. There the evidence will stay until the same officer who seized it picks it up and brings it with him to testify at trial. With some pieces of evidence, it’s stickier; for example, an officer may have to take samples to a laboratory, sealed in a bag with his signature across the tape to prevent tampering, marked with unique identifying information. The laboratory tech who opened and tested the evidence should also testify as a link in the chain of custody.
One thing that often befuddles juries, the public, and even judges and lawyers sometimes: a missing link in the chain of custody goes to the weight, not the admissibility. That is, being unable to prove part of the chain may be taken by the jury to mean the evidence is not as reliable as claimed. But missing links do not automatically mean that the evidence must be excluded entirely. I’d guess, based on what you’ve said, that the prosecution couldn’t prove up the whole chain, and the defense managed to convince the jury that that meant the logs must have been tampered with. Remember, the defense doesn’t have to prove innocence, they only have to confuse the jury enough to cause them to doubt the defendant’s guilt.
The idea behind a chain of custody is to be able to prove that the item in the courtroom is what the state says it is. Some things are easy, such as a modern gun with a legible serial number.
With the TV shows that used perverted justice, the chat logs may be evidence of a crime. In some states, it is a crime to have sexual conversations with children or people who appear to be children. In those situations, the evidence of the crime is the chat logs. Showing up at the sting house with specific items helps prove the identity of the soon-to-be indicted chatter.
If perverted justice gave police chat logs, the police would have procedures to prove they preserved those chat logs. But, that doesn’t prove the chats actually occurred. I have no idea whether perverted justice has procedures to make sure it can prove the chat logs really happened.
If I understand how these shows work, a television show finds some moron on-line who thinks he’s going to score with someone claiming to be a 15 year old girl. Then when he shows up at the house, they film him trying to explain that he didn’t know the girl was 15, and then the police arrest him when he leaves.
So if the chain of custody is insufficient to prove that this guy actually produced those chats on-line that gave him the intent to commit rape, lowering the weight of the only evidence of his intent seems like a reasonable basis for acquittal. I suppose if they have him on film saying he thought the girl was 15, they’d have a basis for conviction. But what I can gather from a few snippets of these shows, the guy says he didn’t know she was 15, or claims to be at the wrong address.
Police are supposed to be trained in Evidence collection/gathering and the handling of it while under custody. If the chain is broken, preservation disturbed, the defense may argue the evidence was tainted/fruit of the poisionous tree.
I know a little about forensics, but back when I took Criminal law, the science was not as advanced as it is today, so I can only speak of basic procedure. There may be laws for the collection and storage of evidence (?), but mostly I would say it is procedural.
Chain of custody means - who handled it from when it was part of the crime until it reached court.
The incident mentioned, of course, shows the problem. If the logs of conversations are just saved to a disk, and then kept on a compter in a room in the studio where anyone and everyone associated with the show can surreptiously edit them without being found, and the show has an interest in showing the perv to be as desipcable as possible - then why should the court trust that the logs are as correct as the studio claims? They are, after all, making money off of pervs. Being shown to use questionable or entrapment techniques would reduce the value of their show. There is an incentive to cheat.
Generally police have no great financial incentive to cheat, and the evidence (as others mentioned above) is sealed or locked or otherwise tracked when not being directly examined by qualified, allegedly impartial experts. Hollywood sensationalist merchants have different motivations.
If your ex-wife showed up in divorce court with text files that she claims are logs of alleged chats between you and her, should they be accepted as gospel?
The purpose of chain of custody is to show the evidence is complete and unaltered. Files that were not certified at the moment of creation, and not stored so that theycould not be altered, are of questionable value - especially if here is no independent corrobration. If the whole point is to show the perv knowingly went to where he expected to find and have illegal sex with an underage girl, then the “knowingly” and intent falls apart if the only proof is basically a file the script writer could have typed up in his spare time.
You better have a lot more evidence if you are trying to get a guy on intent charges.
Chain of custody on an object like a gun is one thing (and usually very simple).
Chat logs are a different problem. The hard part is proving that “Sugardaddy123” whose name appears on the transcript of the typed conversation is the Arthur J Paedophile who is in court charged with the offence. You need all the linking data from ISPs etc, and even then that will only link to a computer, not a particular typist.
That’s not to say it isn’t doable - commonly it is. But it is a fruitful source of argument.
And bagging PD lawyers as though they don’t know this is quite unfair. They will typically insist that the police demonstrate they can prove it. But if they can, there’s not much point in flogging dead horses. And if they can’t, it’s all over for the prosecution whether the defence lawyer is a self-promoting private lawyer or a PD.
Police have long standing procedures to ensure that the chain of custody is clear and apparent, you will have notes, memos, receipts, each of which can be and are placed before the court and while it can be vexing, it is usually simple to prove the chain and as the above posters have said, there is little point in attacking it.
And, the implied and at times explicit view that prosecution departments might be shoddy, irresponsible or malevolent is in my opinion also misplaced. Most prosecution departments are very very very conscientious of their job, as are the police…
I think the implication is that private TV shows, whose value and the participants’ income, rests on protraying a perv as being as evil as possible, and make money off it, are not as trustworthy as civil servants who are paid to be impartial and exact.
While most civil servants don’t have an obvious motive to fabricate a case (beyond the “arrest record” or “conviction rate” stats) people who are paid to produce a particular story have an obvious motive to shade the truth or lie outright. That’s why it’s rare to allow a witness to testify if they sold their story to the tabloids. How reliable are they?
PJ’s bait players chat via a proxy server at PJ’s office. That proxy server captures both sides of the conversation and time/date stamps everything. The bait players do not have access to this log. If the bait player approached first, PJ would have discarded it themselves to avoid such a simple defense. Bait players are instructed not to initiate contact.
So the bait player has a copy on their PC, time/date stamps on, which should match the time/date stamps on the PJ logs if compared.
PJ actually goes to significant effort to make sure they are handing over good clean useful evidence, alot of things get dumped by PJ because they dont want to hand over something a defense attorney is going to destroy in 5 minutes. They do understand rules of evidence and such.
All PJ is really doing is elevating a situation to where law enforcement can consider it probable cause and help establish an identity of a person online.
No, they just throw out the whole investigation rather than hand the police something a defense attorney would shred in 5 minutes. They want convictions using good evidence, and there are more than enough idiots and pervs who don’t need to be framed to keep them busy.
So then… why did the chain of evidence thing even come up?
The same applies. This is a bunch of people, not law enforcement, trying to make money off of showing that a person is a pervert. We don’t know what else was said outside of that log if in fact they do discard some other chats. If the initial chats were made in a public chat room for example, someone may have seen some or all of prior conversations and seen that the person in question was playing as a passive solicitor of secxual activity.
The short answer is that without the COMPLETE conversations of the show’s side, maybe sometime reasonable doubt can be thrown on the prosecution case. Making a ton of money for enticing men to come over and have sex is not the best motivator to ethical and impartial behaviour.
IIRC, it is quite common for a witness’s testimony to be disregarded or not called for if they already sold their story to the tabloids. Once money changes hands in return for a certain type of story, there is a strong motivation to shade the facts.