Sorry it has taken so long to respond,
@zh0r4 and sorry for the rambling answer. You ask some good questions, some of which are tough to answer because we have so many different sizes of LE agencies and each have their own way of doing things. Some have many more resources than others. That being said any size agency has the absolute responsibility to collect and maintain, in a safe and secure manner, any available evidence in relation to a crime. This includes hard evidence, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence, digital evidence, and any and all paperwork accumulated during the course of an investigation.
A small town police department may only have one locked evidence room filled with file cabinets and boxes and may contain anything from murder weapons to drugs to recovered stolen goods whereas a big city police department has separate evidence rooms in each division and for each type of crime; homicide, drugs, sexual assault etc.
But I digress.
Recorded interviews should be backed up, duplicated whenever possible, and they should be accompanied by the officer’s hand written notes. Additionally, the officer should type up a report detailing the statements provided by the witness or suspect during the interview or interrogation. The statement should be signed and dated by both the interviewing officer(s) and by the witness/suspect. This provides a good backup up to a recording.
“Securing and protecting digital evidence has always been a problem. Officers and detectives fear that their digital evidence, which is usually stored on a DVD or flash drive, will become lost, broken, or corrupted. The DVR-type systems many agencies use are notorious for being unreliable, recording choppy or digitizing sound (robot noises instead of words).”
The formal recording of investigative interviews is critical to any criminal case
www.police1.com
Even when LE has good supporting evidence in the event a recording has been damaged or lost, it still may not be enough to convince a jury. They want to see it. When it is missing, some people will believe that the material was intentionally hidden. This in turn causes some jurors to lose trust in the all the prosecution’s evidence. So, yes, when a vital piece of evidence cannot be produced in its original form, it can have a detrimental effect on the prosecution’s case.
I have seen cases where digital evidence was lost or damaged in a current case, but not to the extent we see here. It seems the record keeping in this case was shoddy at best at the local level. I also think there was an over reliance on the FBI ORION system to keep track of everything.
It is more common for files on old cases to be lost. This usually occurs because old files are shifted around, maybe sent to a storage warehouse, to make room for newer cases and make accessibility easier for investigators.
Unfortunately, even records at the highest level of government can be compromised.
A review of government contracts show the use of the hacked Orion tool is widespread, as the impact of the latest cyber espionage campaign is likely to be global.
www.forbes.com
“The National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the DHS and the FBI are also amongst the many branches of the U.S. government that have previously bought the tool.”
All the new high tech reporting and collection systems are amazing, but due to conditions of human error, equipment breakdowns, weather/fire loss, it is sometimes the old fashioned handwritten report that saves the day.
There has been a huge push to go paperless in all factions of society, but electronic storage is fallible, too.
I still find it hard to believe that it was months before Investigators realized that the interview tapes had been overwritten. In a case such as this I would have thought investigators would be poring over the tapes to make sure they had not overlooked anything in a witness interview or suspect interrogation. The way the recording system was set up in the interview room leaves much to be desired. From what I understand, you flipped a switch when you entered the room to start recording and then you flipped it back as you left to stop recording. How many times have any of us “left the lights on” when we left a room? The fact that no one else noticed the issue in the intervening months would seem to show that there was little oversight, but also how few serious cases were being investigated in this small town.
I think most if not all of the many mistakes made in this case were due to
poor management and inexperience. However, that is no excuse. No matter the size of your town or your budget, you have a moral responsibility to protect any evidence collected in a criminal matter whether you have all the high tech tools available to law enforcement or a pen, paper, and camera.
