# Storage of Trial Case Evidence - is food content thrown away? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 18, 2013, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312 "2013-06-18T23:01:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/1 "2013-06-18T23:01:29Z")
A older lady buys groceries and gets mugged & killed walking home. The police gather up the spilled bags contents for evidence. What do they do with perishables? A pound of hamburger meat, loaf of Bread, quart of milk, a couple apples? A kid buys a soda and a bag of skittles. He gets in a fight and shot dead. Would the police evidence room keep the skittle bag and just throw out the candy? A pizza box is found beside a dead homeless guy. Ants swarming over the pizza inside the box. Do the cops keep it all? Or just keep the box? Evidence isn’t always that easy to keep. Milk spills. Hamburger meat rots and gets maggot infested. Live ants breed and multiply. Stale food attracts bugs. What do police evidence rooms do? ---
**Author:** ![Canadjun](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/76d3ee/32.png) [@Canadjun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Canadjun)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/2 "2013-06-18T23:08:09Z")
Deep freeze? Dry Ice? ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/3 "2013-06-18T23:26:30Z")
i recall in the Casey Anthony trial that the child was found in a wooded dumping area. There was years worth of dumped trash there. They had to collect it all, clear the brush, and then sift the soil for bone fragments. They managed to find nearly all the tiny hand and foot bones from that 2 year old kid in the dirt. Quite a amazing job because animals had scattered the bones over a wide area. I always wondered how the wet trash was processed and stored. I had the impression (from the trial) at least some of the item were dried first. Like the child’s baby blanket. I recall it was found wet and muddy. It would mold in storage and I recall them saying it was dried first. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/4 "2013-06-18T23:48:03Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > A older lady buys groceries and gets mugged & killed walking home. The police gather up the spilled bags contents for evidence. What do they do with perishables? A pound of hamburger meat, loaf of Bread, quart of milk, a couple apples? Why would the police bother keeping this food – what is it evidence of? The grocery store receipt, with time, date, and a list of the items purchased, is going to be much better evidence in court. Plus they will show the jury pictures of the scene, with her body lying there and the groceries scattered around. More for emotional impact than evidence, though. Besides, the groceries are her property. The police can’t just keep them – they have to be turned over to her legal heirs. Police – and courts, and juries – have enough common sense to deal with this. ---
**Author:** ![Saltire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saltire/32/553_2.png) [@Saltire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saltire)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/5 "2013-06-19T00:02:47Z")
Decisions have to be made about what is relevant evidence and what isn’t, and some of the stuff you ask about might be deemed irrelevant and tossed. But if something perishable is thought useful to the case, every evidence storage facility has at least a small freezer. Larger ones would have several freezers and some refrigerators as well. There is a very useful science connected to insect activity around crime scenes. It mostly works with bugs around corpses, but it isn’t inconceivable that maggots on a food item in at a crime scene could tell investigators something useful. They would probably collect the bugs and kill them quickly so that a forensic entomologist could examine it for its exact stage of development. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/6 "2013-06-19T01:55:42Z")
I wasn’t sure how much common sense they used with evidence anymore. A pizza slice with a bite mark probably has saliva on it. No question that slice should be saved. Do they save the rest of the pizza because of a one and a bajillion chance there’s a speck of dandruff or a hair on it? Choosing which evidence to save must be a tough call. Much like data for a computer programmer. It’s easy to get buried in too much of it. I keep imagining several stuffed storage lockers of garbage recovered from the Casey Anthony crime scene. That site had been an illegal dump for years. ---
**Author:** ![yellowjacketcoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/4bbf92/32.png) [@yellowjacketcoder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowjacketcoder)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/7 "2013-06-19T12:59:36Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > A pizza slice with a bite mark probably has saliva on it. No question that slice should be saved. I seriously doubt the pizza slice would be saved, bite or no bite. Getting saliva off pizza is a fool’s errand. It would be tossed out. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/8 "2013-06-19T15:34:27Z")
> [@yellowjacketcoder](#): > > I seriously doubt the pizza slice would be saved, bite or no bite. Getting saliva off pizza is a fool’s errand. It would be tossed out. Yeah, that seems a bit “watched too much CSI to me.” But some scenarios may not be as far-fetched. Same granny killed as she’s leaving the grocery store as one of the earlier hypotheticals. Except she was shot from behind, a single through-and-through bullet that lodges in her package of frozen ground beef. If you want to do any ballistics, you’ll need that slug. And to get the slug, you’ll either have to disassemble the package and pull the slug at the scene, or take the whole package as evidence and preserve it until the lab can extract the slug. You wouldn’t necessarily keep the beef itself any longer than you need it… but you certainly wouldn’t just toss it or ignore it on scene (if you knew that’s where the fatal shot lodged). ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/9 "2013-06-19T15:39:02Z")
It would depend on the jurisdiction and the specific trial facts as well as the nature of the case. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/10 "2013-06-19T16:21:13Z")
Have you seen the cop whose job it is to guard the evidence area? Pretty sure he’s eating the pizza, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/storage-of-trial-case-evidence-is-food-content-thrown-away/661312/11 "2013-06-22T01:02:47Z")
I’m a former prosecutor and now a magistrate. Never heard of food evidence being kept in any case, _ever_. Photos could be taken, though, and witnesses could testify as to what they saw. Other perishable evidence (especially flesh and body fluids) is refrigerated or frozen.