eDiscovery Daily Blog

• January 27, 2017

In our webcast on Wednesday titled What Every Attorney Should Know About eDiscovery in 2017 (if you missed it, you can watch it here), we covered (as we always do) several key cases that established eDiscovery best practices and trends (and a few with litigants behaving badly).  One of the questions from the audience was to ask whether we could provide any eDiscovery case law related to criminal cases.  Apparently, every example we provided was a civil case.

We will have to add in coverage of criminal cases the next time we conduct a presentation like that.  Regardless, I told the audience that I could send them some links to criminal cases we’ve covered if they wanted to send me an email and a few of the attendees did so.  As a result, I performed a search on the blog (after all, it is a knowledge base with the entire 6+ year history of posts) to look for criminal cases that we’ve covered in the past.

Here are seven posts relating to criminal cases – it’s not an exhaustive list, but it does provide at least a sampling of cases that we’ve covered over the years (#7 is my favorite):

Court Denies Defendant’s Motion to Require Plaintiff to Re-Produce Data in a More Usable Format: In United States v. Meredith, Kentucky Senior District Judge Charles R. Simpson, III denied the defendant’s motion to compel production of electronically stored information (ESI) by the plaintiff in a usable format, agreeing that the plaintiff had fulfilled its discovery production obligation pertaining to the manner and format of the ESI.

Court Rules that Judges Can Consider Predictive Algorithms in Sentencing: Score one for big data analytics.  According to The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled last week that sentencing judges may take into account algorithms that score offenders based on their risk of committing future crimes.

Was Spoliation Intentional? Court Will Let Jury Decide: In Cahill v. Dart, Illinois District Judge John Z. Lee adopted, with modifications, the Report and Recommendation of Magistrate Judge Cox regarding the plaintiff’s motion to sanction the defendants for destruction of evidence, indicating that Judge Cox’s proposed sanction would be imposed and also that the jury would be informed that the defendants failed to meet their duty to preserve video, giving the plaintiff the option to argue to the jury that the failure to preserve the video was intentional.

Government Ordered to Maintain Expensive Custom Database Shared with Criminal Defendant: In the criminal case of United States v. Shabudin, California Magistrate Judge Nandor J. Vadas ordered the Government to continue to provide access to a Relativity Database used by the parties to review documents produced by the Government, instead of discontinuing access for the defendants several weeks before trial was to begin due to budgetary issues.

Hard Drive Turned Over to Criminal Defendant – Eight Years Later: As reported by WRAL.com in Durham, North Carolina, the defense in State of North Carolina v. Raven S. Abaroa filed a Motion to Dismiss the Case for Discovery Violations after the state produced a forensic image of a hard drive (in the middle of trial) that had been locked away in the Durham Police Department for eight years.

Court Denies Criminal Defendant’s Attempt to Quash Twitter Subpoena: In People v. Harris, Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. ruled that the defendant lacked standing to move to quash the prosecution’s subpoena served upon Twitter, a third-party in the case, for records of the defendant’s Twitter account. The defendant was a protester arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in prosecuting the case, the prosecution sought his Twitter records for the time period relevant to the defendant’s involvement in the march.

Free Trojans with Your Document Production: An Arkansas lawyer representing three Fort Smith police officers in a whistleblower case is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request, according to a story by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

If you know of a recent criminal case (with eDiscovery implications) that you’d like for us to cover, feel free to send me a link to it and I’ll see about covering it.

So, what do you think?  Do you practice law in criminal courts and feel that there’s not enough discussion about eDiscovery for your cases?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.