Why is it important to preserve forensic evidence?
You’ve been charged with a criminal offence, and you retain our law firm, and you in come to see me or one of the other lawyers or speak to our staff on the phone, one of the first things we’re going to say to you is what evidence do you have that needs to be preserved. For example, you’ve been charged with domestic assault, and you tell us you have bruises, you need to get those bruises seen by other people, and photographed right away. The ideal situation there for example, would be to have a Private I get into a Private I’s office, next day, an independent witness, can take multiple photographs, know how to take the photographs and preserve the evidence. Failing which, you could have a friend or multiple friends take the photographs. There’s also all sorts of other situations, I mean, we are talking cell phone records, Facebook records, any type of records or evidence that you have, that might assist your case, and I say might, uh, that needs to be preserved. If you lose that evidence, you could lose your case, because we are trying to create a reasonable doubt, so we go over that very carefully, to clients and it’s important to examine your memory, what do I have that might help me here, how do I preserve it. For example, if you have something on a cellphone, I wouldn’t even use that cell phone again, I get it downloaded, right away to an expert and I wouldn’t even, I’d preserve the cell phone, and never use it again. If you’ve got text messages, you don’t want to lose those, you need them printed right away, and you need to give them to your lawyer. So that’s how to preserve evidence and it’s very important, and if you want to win your case, you need to be able to make full answer and defence, and preserving evidence is the key to do that.
