Court Says Cops Can't Testify In Case After Destroying Footage Of DUI Arrest
from the if-we-can't-see-it,-you-can't-talk-about-it dept
Cops like cameras.
No, wait. Hear me out.
Obviously not on them or aimed at them.
They like automatic cameras that record license plate and location data. They like surveillance cameras aimed at citizens around the clock. They even like dashcams and body cams, provided the released footage is limited to exonerating officers of wrongdoing.
What they don't like are cameras that don't show their side of the story. A camera is inherently trustworthy -- much like a confidential informant -- until it isn't, at which point any footage captured is claimed to be devoid of "context" or unable to show "the whole picture." In some cases, the cameras don't show anything at all.
Sure, the footage may have been available at some point. But it's suddenly missing when the defense needs it.
In Illinois, this mysterious lack of footage has resulted in an exoneration.
A motorist accused of drunk driving walked away after cops in Chicago, Illinois refused to hand over video evidence of the incident. In a ruling last month, the Illinois Appellate Court said Richard Moravec was entitled not just to any dashcam videos of his arrest, but also relevant footage from the city's network of surveillance devices known as "police observational devices" or POD cameras.Chicago has lots of "PODs" running 24 hours a day and monitored by officers. (For extra fun, scroll down the page and read the section entitled "POD Success Stories.") All footage is saved for two weeks. Obviously, if the footage is central to a criminal prosecution, the footage is supposed to be saved until the case is concluded. But when this motorist challenged his arrest, the footage suddenly couldn't be found, despite his lawyer asking for the footage to be turned over before the two-week retention period ended.
When asked for the footage, a host of technical issues appeared out of nowhere.
A Chicago police officer stopped Moravec at the intersection of Thomas Street and Western Avenue in Chicago, a location in sight of three separate police surveillance cameras. Police officials told Moravec's attorney that no dashcam video of the arrest had been found and that video taken at the police station was unavailable due to "technical issues with the video system." Finally, the surveillance camera footage had allegedly been overwritten.The driver wasn't found not guilty, but in light of the Chicago PD being unable to produce the recordings, the presiding judge sanctioned the department by forbidding the officers involved from testifying for the prosecution. "Our word against yours" doesn't mean nearly as much when those words aren't allowed in the courtroom.
Of course, the Chicago PD felt this was too harsh and objected to the judge's sanctions, claiming it was "too heavy" in relation to the apparent misdeed. The judge disagreed.
"The correct sanction to be applied for a discovery violation is a decision appropriately left to the discretion of the trial court, and its judgment shall be given great weight," Justice Simon wrote. "The trial court gave due consideration to the fact that both the state and the Chicago police department failed to preserve the videos, even though they were timely notified to do so... Therefore, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in precluding the testimony of the police officers when the state committed a discovery violation."This is a heartening decision considering the number of cameras in use by Chicago police officers. The granting of the defendant's motion for sanctions specifically notes that a lack of footage -- for whatever reason -- should be construed against the state, rather than accepted as something beyond anyone's control.
Following the parties’ oral argument, the trial court granted defendant’s motion in limine to prevent the testimony of the police officers and stated that “without there being explanation as to a legitimate basis for the tape not being available, that has to be construed against the State.” The trial court asserted that it granted defendant’s motion in limine and for sanctions pursuant to Kladis, a case where the supreme court upheld the judgment of the appellate court that granted the defendant’s motion for sanctions and barred the State from presenting testimony as to the events surrounding the defendant’s arrest after it was discovered that the State destroyed the police squad car’s recording of the defendant’s arrest.This is where the burden should fall. If police departments are going to deploy an increasing amount of surveillance equipment, any lack of relevant footage should be law enforcement's burden to bear. If the agency decides it's not worth the time or money to repair malfunctioning cameras, then it should have to deal with the consequences of de-prioritizing surveillance equipment that mysteriously seems to function best only when it's exonerating officers or being presented as evidence by prosecutors.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: body cameras, cameras, destroying evidence, police, richard moravec
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Not ideal, but an improvement
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Not ideal, but an improvement
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Sheriff K-9 unit Offieer founf to be untruthful. Arizona YCSO
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
The fact that the defendant is the one that wants the camera footage and the cops want to hide it strongly suggests who's at fault here.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Or, great technicality! You can get a DUI thrown out by losing footage of it. I thought it would be all about the breath test or roadside "eyes closed hands out to your sides, now touch your nose" test.
How'd the camera even need to be involved?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
In this case, assuming the Cops weren't lying about charging him w/ DUI, the cameras would've shown the walking test & if they even bothered w/ a breathalyzer (or if they purposefully relocated out of site of the cameras). It might also show his driving, depending on where the cameras pointed, showing if there was even grounds for a stop.
Those cameras could be everything to the Defense, & probably were if the City lost them. Due to all this, the Court is right to assume they'd be everything for the Defense.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The FBI didn't even start recording interviews until 2014 :-O
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-justice-record-idUSBREA4L0W320140522
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Chicago cops
So there's really no surprise that these officers lied and destroyed evidence: it's what they do.
Second, Chicago cops work hard to destroy evidence all the time because they don't want to be recorded. Sometime they disable their equipment by putting the batteries in backwards; sometimes they disable it by breaking it; sometimes they try to locate and destroy other video recordings.
This is just business as usual in Chicago: cops lie, cops steal, cops rape, cops murder. It's what they do.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Chicago cops
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Druggies not feeling pain
In extreme cases it takes several bullets to take a drug addict that is lashing on a cop and he still fights while on the ground.
Therefore it's hard to tell from the cops POV who is the crazed drug addict that will decide to take a swing at them VS your life as a private citizen.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Druggies not feeling pain
Oh right. It was the excuse used by those who regularly abused animals at one time then it was those dealing with the inmates of sanitoriums.
Excuses are still just excuses for bad behavior.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Druggies not feeling pain
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Druggies not feeling pain
yes, /s, obviously. "piece" was intentional.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Druggies not feeling pain
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Druggies not feeling pain
I did do a fast Google & it seems that most of these cases the person died in custody. Huh, imagine that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Druggies not feeling pain
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Loose footage from two cameras, you must be incompetent.
Loose footage from three or more cameras, your criminal intentions become obvious.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Isn't destroying evidence a crime?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Isn't destroying evidence a crime?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Isn't destroying evidence a crime?
Oh, wait. DMCA, penalty of perjury. Nevermind those meaningless words that only have meaning when the powers that be want it to.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Personally, I think that civilian review boards should be set up and that all video captured via dash-cam, body cam or other POD devices should be automatically uploaded to a private server where an independent review board, free from law enforcement, can review the footage and provide it to the court under evidence.
Video footage should not be stored on any device that is maintained by the police department.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Now, supposing for a moment that this is indeed true, what if police video were uploaded to a server that distributed it to multiple servers. That way a copy of it ends up with multiple off site backups.
Police department video servers could serve as backups for other police department's video. The storage costs would be well worth it to the public.
This would also enable there to be a separate server under control of an independent review board, free from the tentacles of law enforcement, and available to the courts and defense attornies upon request.
Oh, but according to the MPAA, using a technology, say, like bittorrent to efficiently distribute video is pure evil. Nevermind.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Great idea, but the rules of evidence say that is just not a legal way to do it. Every offsite backup would be a security issue, with the risk of footage being made public or being altered in a manner that would destroy it's value as evidence.
"Oh, but according to the MPAA, using a technology, say, like bittorrent to efficiently distribute video is pure evil. Nevermind."
Nobody says it's pure evil if it's your video. Bad troll!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Especially if there's backdoors built into the encryption schemes they use. You're seriously trying to argue that offsite backups are not feasible because of security issues?
Perhaps if you supported stronger encryption that problem wouldn't exist.
Jackass.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
It should be made public. It's footage being taken on public property.
"or being altered in a manner that would destroy it's value as evidence."
I think you miss the point. The point is that if multiple backups are quickly made in multiple different locations, before anyone has any time to see the footage or know that there is something important occurring at a specific time that needs to be altered at a specific location before it gets copied over because the copying process it happening in real time, then any one of those backup sites would have to coordinate with every other site that has a copy of the footage in order to make every copy identical. Any discrepancies would then be regarded as evidence against the prosecution which is valuable evidence. Any delay between the time that an event occurred and the time that it was transferred over for backup would also be constructed as valuable evidence against the prosecution.
But I'm sure you're just trolling, you can't possibly be this incompetent.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
He is.
Do you really not see how your arguments work against yourself?
He doesn't.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I guess the part of his brain responsible for bringing arguments to their logical conclusions is absent.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Hey, dumbass, altering an offsite backup DOES NOT alter the original.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Entirely consisten
Allowing police to give testimony that conflicts with the defence's story would destroy the effect of the sanction.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Memo...
NOTICE
Do not have ANY interaction with the public at the intersection of Thomas Street and Western Avenue as this area is been deemed UNSAFE for officers to perform their duties.
Note: Other locations are being identified and will be disseminated soon.
Chief Thug
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Walk in another mans shoes.
What would the state think the proper sanction would be in that situation?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Walk in another mans shoes.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
How police cameras work
Many departments use completely different means of transmitting video from the VPU to the backend server. Many smaller departments literally walk P2 cards or SSDs over to a dock (or physically hand it off to their IT guy) to upload manually, some transmit via WiFi when their cars are next at the PD and in range, and some use city-wide WiFi (this latter option is quite rare). You can do some other things... some giant PDs have things like mobile command centers -- big ole vans or what-have-you with backends running on them, so cars can visit the command center (maybe they all go to Chipotle for lunch or whatever), upload VPU contents to it (command center videos are then eventually merged into the primary backend), then go back to patrolling with much less risk of data loss nor the inconvenience of having to park in a PD depot.
Because it's not far-fetched that these 4-6 cameras are each recording 1080p@60fps, and if you imagine, say, 250GB total storage in a VPU, this is a very plausible (but still not acceptable) scenario if an officer is not at the PD for an extended period of time (for example, if he keeps his car at home overnight and goes on patrol in the morning instead of going back to the PD long enough for the video to upload to the backend). When storage fills up, the VPUs of most vendors will typically just start recording over the oldest footage.
Fwiw.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How police cameras work
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: How police cameras work
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How police cameras work
I don't think that serves to mitigate loss of evidence.
There are procedures in place to allow video evidence to be retained for use against a suspect. When that is done, it actually makes the camera video evidentiary for every crime it records.
To put it simply: the police don't get to decide the recording is evidence for this crime and not for that crime; it becomes evidence for every crime. That's because the Constitution does not allow the police/prosecutor to pick and choose which evidence the defense can see or bring to court.
Such a procedure as you describe would be incompetent. Because you can bet the officer would drop off the recording of a guy-who-hit-an-officer (for example). If the officer can and will do that, but shrugs off the DUI-arrest recording, well the officer becomes a decider of which evidence the defense can see.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]