I sure want the prosecution to win in this trial, but I agree with the defence’s request here. This reeks like the US Secret Service losing a ton of text messages surrounding the January 6th coup attempt because there was another convenient “device upgrade” that caused messages to be irrecoverably lost.
The courts should be coming in hard telling law enforcement agencies that you don’t get to destroy data you’re supposed to be archiving because “shrug there was a system upgrade”.
This is a serious oversight and compliance problem on the part of police that isn’t specifically related to this case, but is something that needs to be broadly understood and respected.
It has the same stink as police turning off their body cams right before beating some unarmed “assailant” to death.
No matter there is not much engagement on Lemmy, the only comment I see says it all clearly and concisely.
This is how we suddenly GET cops using personal phones for comms because they’re simply unwilling to commit anything to texts from or to the work phone that may one day implicate them out of context.
And it’s easy to decide context will never matter, but “that’s James Connolly on the corner” “let’s get him” is an easy thing to twist from an arrest to a hastily planned bullying.
But your example includes the context. If James was arrested without incident, “get him” is obviously nothing nefarious.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The judge overseeing a criminal trial for two organizers of the truck convoy protests is ordering the Crown disclose internal police documents to the defence.
Their lawyers had requested information from Ottawa Police Service about a software upgrade that resulted in at least two officers who were communicating directly with protesters having their phones wiped.
The defence is arguing that those officers, who were on a police liaison team texting, calling and speaking with protesters are important witnesses deserving of scrutiny.
Justice Heather Perkins-McVey echoed previous comments she had made when she said it “is very unusual” for two police officers who were expected to be trial witnesses to have lost potential evidence because of a phone upgrade.
Perkins-McVey is also giving what she called “careful consideration” to emails Ottawa police argued shouldn’t be shared because of solicitor-client privilege.
They argued they were inadvertently shared with the Crown and didn’t need to be disclosed, but Perkins-McVey ordered the documents be given for her review to determine if they are relevant to Lich and Barber’s defence.
The original article contains 479 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
