ICE is claiming the computer ate its records the day after it was sued for abuse.
404 Media reports that after ICE’s Bridgeview Detention Center outside Chicago was sued October 30 for allegedly abusing detainees, the agency said that two weeks of video footage that could have shown how immigration detainees are treated in the facility was lost in a “system crash” on October 31.
“The government has said that the data for that period was lost in a system crash apparently on the day after the lawsuit was filed,” one of the lawyers representing detainees, Alec Solotorovsky, said in a Thursday hearing about the footage, according to 404 Media. “That period we think is going to be critical … because that’s the period right before the lawsuit was filed.”
In a sane justice system, this would be treated with utmost contempt and all accusations against them that could have been proven by this would be considered to be factual unless ICE could disprove them. In our justice system, it will probably result in no penalties for anyone involved.
Juries are directly instructed that they can make that exact assumption. Destroying evidence means the jury will assume it was damaging. So to bother doing so, the actual evidence is almost surely worse than what they would assume.
4.19 LOST OR DESTROYED EVIDENCE
If you find that the government intentionally [destroyed][failed to preserve] [insert description of evidence] that the government knew or should have known would be evidence in this case, you may infer, but are not required to infer, that this evidence was unfavorable to the government.
“System crash” is used here in the general sense, not the specific behavior of a program closing or a device turning off. Could be that shit went so wild that the system became unusable. Or a power outage caused data corruption. Or a buffer overflow overwrote critical data. I could go on.
But I don’t think any of this happened. I think they just deleted it. Maybe they’ll magically find another copy in a few weeks.
In a sane justice system, this would be treated with utmost contempt and all accusations against them that could have been proven by this would be considered to be factual unless ICE could disprove them. In our justice system, it will probably result in no penalties for anyone involved.
Juries are directly instructed that they can make that exact assumption. Destroying evidence means the jury will assume it was damaging. So to bother doing so, the actual evidence is almost surely worse than what they would assume.
https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/674
Adverse inference is very much a thing.
When a system crashes it doesn’t just start randomly deleting videos. HDD recovery should be possible, where are the backups?
100% BS.
“System crash” is used here in the general sense, not the specific behavior of a program closing or a device turning off. Could be that shit went so wild that the system became unusable. Or a power outage caused data corruption. Or a buffer overflow overwrote critical data. I could go on.
But I don’t think any of this happened. I think they just deleted it. Maybe they’ll magically find another copy in a few weeks.
Time to pull out that electron microscope and get some hard drive recovery