People often ask whether audio and video materials can be considered evidence in court?
Are audio and video materials accepted as evidence by the court?
The entire security industry is built on audio and video recording.
What is the real benefit of recorded materials in judicial bodies?
How to properly organize a recording to get a practical result?
What is digital recording for judicial bodies?
These questions are answered today by an employee of the Research Institute Spetslab, an institute that conducts examinations in the field of high technologies for the investigative bodies of the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
If you refer to the Law, then they are not direct evidence, but can only be taken into account.
But even if the wording of the law were the opposite, this would not change the outcome of the case.
The well-known fingerprint examination, although considered evidence by law, has the same chances of being challenged as audio and video materials.
In most cases, fingerprints are easier to fake than a high-quality video recording.
It is enough to just let you hold a glass of water, so that your «fingers» can be scanned on a computer and the dummy can be reproduced on a volumetric printer.
Moreover, the cost of such a printer is not high, around 10-15 thousand dollars, the price of a scanner is $300, a computer is $500, plus work.
In addition, there is a lot of information on the Internet about how to do without a computer — everything can be done with improvised means from wax.
And now you are a criminal, because your fingerprints were found at the scene of the murder.
Today's Court can be compared to a fight in the ring.
There are knockouts in boxing and in court — indisputable evidence, but such beautiful fights happen extremely rarely.
In most cases, both in boxing and in court, the winner is determined by the number of «points scored».
AVM (audio-video materials) can give winning points if the punches delivered do not hit the opponent's gloves!
Note that by themselves they mean little, as, in general, any other evidence. Although in some, and even many cases, AVM lead to a «knockout» if the accused is inexperienced and admits their authenticity from the beginning to the end of the trial.
ABMs undoubtedly have a serious psychological impact, inclining the «client» to be frank. But if you advise someone you know to refuse to confess at any stage of the trial or investigation, the materials turn into a work of art, inappropriate in Court.
ABMs are evidence on which you can build proof. To do this, you need to have a good (better than your opponent) understanding of the legal and technical aspects, and they are as follows:
The entry must be tied to a place and time.
What does this mean?
In simplified language, we can say this…
If you have a recording of a crime committed in a certain apartment, and you found a grandmother who saw the person recorded on the recording enter the entrance of the building where the apartment was located, and at the time the recording was made, then, theoretically, you have a good chance that this recording will be turned into evidence.
Of course, in practice, questions will arise that will require further confirmation that the grandmother has a phenomenal memory, and that at that moment there was a huge wall clock hanging in front of her.
In all cases, a sufficient number of witnesses that the person recorded by the camera was at the specified time near the place where the recording was made gives a crowning series of points.
The human factor.
But, as investigators say, it is easier to convince an innocent person to repent than to find a witness. Especially since your grandmother, under various pressures, may suddenly turn out to be blind, insane, and not a grandmother at all by the end of the trial.
What kind of hoaxes can you not see in court today!
Very often, bets made only on witness testimony fall sharply before the day the verdict is announced — our witness is too unprotected today, and who needs extra problems?
But, in order to exclude the human factor, all this electronics is installed, incorruptible and fearless!
And it turns out that it is dependent?
Not everything is so tragic, this was only the first version of the evidence base, usually acceptable for civilized countries.
A machine can also be taught to prove the circumstances of a case.
Let's go through the points and score points.
Time binding.
There are now enough recording systems on the market that store time stamps inside the recording, inextricably linked to audio and video data.
It is preferable to use such devices.
Moreover, they differ significantly in accordance with the level of protection against counterfeiting provided. And those who, not trusting the digital recording, try to transfer it to a regular cassette for presentation in court are deeply wrong.
Digital tags are most easily embedded in an analog medium, so any expert examination immediately questions them. There is no special division between digital and analog media for judges; they are not required by law to even understand both of these terms.
Judges rely entirely on expert examination data in their work. And the expert examination examines the recording itself and gives a conclusion on it, whether it is written on a tape recorder or on stone.
Recording format.
There are now many digital recorders on the market, the durability of the media of which is not much different from analog ones. As a rule, the Windows standard «avi» is used, which is extremely easy to fake.
In this regard, it cannot be ruled out the possibility that you did not put time marks in last year's recording and did not pass it off as today's.
There are a number of companies, usually large and well-known, that use their own recording format, the development of which requires a lot of effort and time.
How to choose exactly such a company?
First of all, inquire about the period of its existence on the market and the development of this particular system. The longer it is, the more likely it is that «the toy has turned into an adult thing.» Ask to copy a test file and show it to a specialist.
The most preferable systems are those that pre-divide the disk space for themselves and write information to a single file.
Manufacturers of such systems include, for example, SAMSUNG, SONY, Panasonic, Philips, Motorola, ISS, SpecLab. If the file system for GOAL-Light`2003 was developed for a year and a half by a group of specialists, then we can conclude that even a crude forgery will take at least 3 months.
The calculation is based on statistical tables supported by expert laboratories.
Although Russian courts, unlike American ones, do not rely on precedents, such conclusions are actually taken into account in legal proceedings.
If you present a recording three months after the event, your points will decrease somewhat.
So remember the time factor.
Your well-being.
The cost of making a counterfeit is also calculated. If it is prohibitively high compared to your standard of living, then put a few more points in your pocket. In general, the poorer you are, the better. So do not come to Court in a luxury limousine. I would like to note right away that if the accused puts forward a version of political persecution, the prices immediately cease to be relevant. For some reason, it is assumed in advance that there is no limit to the sums of money in politics. So, if your opponent is a deputy or an activist of any of the parties (fortunately, the number of parties has noticeably decreased before the last elections), all your points will go three to one against you.
Linked to the place.
The procedure will also require your efforts. First, take care of the safety of the camera itself, with which the recording was made. If it does not work, you will have to try to get exactly the same design. Try not to knock down the focus of the lens, since the examination will be carried out using a recording device installed in the place from which it was conducted. The accuracy of the match between the original image and the one obtained as a result of the tests will be examined. But this alone is not enough.
Time of trust in the recording.
To make a high-quality forgery of the actions of any person against the background of the ordered object (target), it is necessary to film all the actions of the person of interest or certain parts of his body against the background of another object (source).
Automatic counterfeiting is possible only if the «source» is a uniform background. Moreover, the uniformity must fit into the range of 10 to 55 shades (depending on the contrast of the illumination), which is practically impossible in real life, unless artificial conditions were created.
It is important that the «source» and «target» have the same geometric shapes and sizes. (I omit the scaling issues due to the limited printing space.)
They must also have proportional sizes of obstacles. The examination examines everything: from the correspondence of the scales of the supposed overlaps to the temporal proportionality of their movements.
In practice, ideal conditions are extremely rare, and in half the cases the possibility of their creation is immediately eliminated during the study of the «target» object. Most often, forgery is done by manually cleaning each frame.
Such work is equivalent to drawing a picture on a computer; only a good artist can do it well. The longer the recording, the more effort and, accordingly, money it requires. If there are 24-25 frames per second, then for a 10-minute video you will have to draw 15,000 pictures.
Naturally, if you present this recording to the investigation the next day, there will be almost no doubt about its authenticity. So hurry! The time it takes for your recording to be trusted depends on its length and speed.
Travel tips.
To extend the period of trust in the AVM, choose high-speed systems with good recording quality, install more cameras, both in different places and in one room.
If the same action is recorded by several cameras, spaced apart, you get the jackpot. Forgery of such a recording, if it is of high quality, is not even discussed.
Naturally, the cost of the recording system increases. Here, as in many things, the law applies: the more expensive, the more effective!
Not all is lost.
If you are reading this article when it is too late to choose a system, do not lose hope. First, urgently legalize your AVMs or place them in a publicly controlled place, for example, in a bank cell.
If there are no records in the cell access book that you touched it after that, the Court may decide to seize it from the bank in the presence of witnesses.
In addition, the AVM can be linked to the place and time by the crime scene itself.
True, in our real practice, this only happened in cases of murder.
If the video recording accurately matches the nature of the blows, the injuries received, and the movement of objects found at the crime scene, then it serves as serious evidence in the case.
It is important that the investigative bodies do their job well: make an inventory of the scattered things, take video or photographs, and conduct a thorough examination of the wounds of the corpse (which is not always done).
Legality of the record.
There are practical cases when the Court does not accept AVM for consideration if the opposing party proves that they were obtained illegally.
Therefore, you should also take care of the «purity» of the record. You should not adjust everything to the letter of the law — this way you will not record anything.
There is the following practice for resolving this issue: write down everything that is within your private property without any problems.
Even an intimate situation can be played out as a defense of your life.
In an office, warn your employees by signature about the presence of an audio or video surveillance system.
In other places, a lot depends on the situation.
If you recorded an ordinary bandit attack, the Court will most likely accept your AVM for consideration.
If you are trying to prove the fact of bribery on the part of an official, expect challenges.
In all cases, there are many ways to turn an unauthorized recording into a legal one, for example, to get a job at the nearest media outlet.
The law in «some cases» (and in practice always) allows journalists to make hidden audio and video recordings.
And remember that phrases like «found on the road» are no longer accepted.
The material is compiled based on the practice of applying expert opinions in the field of high technologies of the Research Institute Spetslab