Define the Concept and Create Measures
Running Head: DIGITAL PRESERVATION OF EVIDENCE
Digital Preservation of Evidence 2
The effectiveness of the Innocence Project in Preservation of Evidence
Introduction
Wrongful conviction is an international concern. American prisons are full of various prisoners who were convicted wrongly. The purpose of the development of the innocent projects is to exonerate the wrongly convicted prisoners through DNA testing and participate in criminal justice reformation to prevent future injustices. Digital preservation of evidence is an important aspect of Innocent Project by ensuring authenticity, traceability, and accuracy of any proof. Preservation of data in criminal justice is a complex process not because of the dynamics of the digital world but the need to recreate the context of use. In other words, there is a need for maintenance of the data while only specific software may be compatible with the available technology system in criminal justice. The preservation phase is the initial stage of evidence recovery and it involves seizing and protecting the suspect data without interfering or altering the content of the data (Casey, 2011).
Cybercrimes, as well as their evidence, are growing exponentially. This increase will eventually lead to the need to evaluate the large quantity of information. The accuracy of a secure storage of data may be of great benefit to support and generate accuracy in all evidence. Digital research on preservation of evidence has been a critical research area for the past 20 years especially after the establishment of the Innocent Project (Casey, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to have a comprehensive overview of a digital crime system that can help in the preservation of information with reference to the Innocent Project.
The research question for the topic would be, how can a digital criminal justice system help Preservation of Evidence?
Overview of Preservation of Digital Evidence
There is an increasing buzz inside the information management systems especially on the challenges provided by the digital storage system that may be lost for various reasons. But, preservation of data is not only focused on maintenance of the digital tools to ensure meaningful utilization in the future but also ensure the digital objects to be preserved in their context that they are understandable by future users. Within the procedure of digital preservation of Innocent Project includes safe-guarding long-term data loss, digital preservation requires expertise and skills in information science and information technology. Furthermore, it has an implication on social, historical, economic and technology (Quick & Choo, 2014).
The social impact of Digital preservation of evidence
Digital preservation within the social set up allows the community to have access to digital documentation stored and who is has the ability to be disseminated publicly. Therefore, digital preservation has a contribution to social set up of a community by providing accurate records as well as improving the social security. In no time, the community will have information from various areas including scientific technology, entertainment as well digital libraries including having a virtual visit to a library. The historical implication of digital data preservation will have an impact on the on the cultural heritage. Digital preservation will eliminate the temporary lapse that occurs when researching on historical data due to loss or missing information. Looking at the economic implication, financial sustainability is one of the factors to be investigated during the installation of digital preservation devices. Also, there is need to consider the prevailing cost of losing depending on the type of data involved (Casey, 2011).
Important of evaluation of the topic
The main reason for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the Innocent Project in the preservation of evidence is to investigate the ability for the criminal institution to view, retrieve and remain updated in the rapid changes in the criminal justice technology. Information loss can be as a result of an attack by virus, theft or outbreak of fire. A relevant digital system can help in ensuring the availability of accurate information even after any interference with the evidence. In other words, the digital system should trace any form alteration while providing the original data to help in judging a case. Ensuring there are integrity and consistency of the evidence require periodic and timely checks from the management to identify partial hardware failures while triggering repair and maintenance by the technical team (Quick & Choo, 2014).
Why the need for Digital Evidence Preservation
Majority of today's crimes have digital elements that include DNA traces; this duplicates the amount of digital evidence preserved for the specific period. It is the Innocent Project’s role to ensure the use of the digital service to store evidence for an investigation’s history. For the Innocent Project present digital evidence in the court, the evidence must be collected, analyzed by experts and preserved properly. But the current system often involves multiple steps that may not meet the changing and growing needs of the wave of technology. The current operation may not handle the changing needs and it may soon become economically unfeasible for the institution responsible for performing such tasks. On the other hand, the technology discovery has been at the peak in the current century. Unless criminal justice institution and the Innocent Project adopts to the new wave of technology, suspects can be few steps ahead of them by utilizing the current technology to hide or erase evidence especially that involves DNA (Turner, 2005).
Digital Evidence Today
For the proper and accurate preservation of digital evidence, digital examiners must have the tactics to retrieve information from cellular phones, tablets, desktops, laptops and other external storage devices. Digital evidence comes from both the victim and suspect since their personal device could provide better information in solving the case. Other evidence that point towards guilt such as threatening messages or emails needs to be adequately preserved for the presentation to the court. Innocent Project indicates that any move that can lead to the alteration of the evidence will make it null and incapable of solving a case. With the inevitable change of technology, the law enforcement must work in hand with other partners, like prosecutors and the court to establish policies that would lead to the reliability of evidence preserved prior to the court proceedings (Turner, 2005).
Determination of unsatisfied requirements
Lawyer and judges need to have a common understanding of the elements that guarantee the admissibility of a digital proof from the court. Across America, the legal framework is similar in most courts. Inability to understand authentication of digital evidence can lead to incorrect and reverse outcomes from the federal court. These failures are as a result of incapacity to properly authenticate the computer generated evidence or improper storage of the evidence. To address these issues, the court must develop a strategy to determine the admissibility of digital evidence presented by witnesses or the Innocent Project. Having uniformity in the standard of analysis of digital evidence can lead to a tactical approach in judging cases (Turner, 2005).
Conclusion
Whether investigating the wrongly convicted corporate or criminal case, digital data is an important aspect of the functioning of the Innocent Project. Hence it is the duty of forensic experts to ensure that there is accuracy in the digital evidence presented. Therefore storage of digital evidence should be in such a way that it shouldn’t be altered during the collection, analysis and the investigation process. Any digital device can be an important source of evidence in case of any crime but often the collection, management, and preservation of this evidence are not done correctly. In summary, for a digital data to be considered as accurate evidence, there is need to ensure a high level of integrity, especially during preservation (Turner, 2005).
References
Casey, E. (2011). Digital evidence and computer crime: Forensic science, computers, and the internet. Academic press.
Turner, P. (2005). Unification of digital evidence from disparate sources (digital evidence bags). Digital Investigation, 2(3), 223-228.
Quick, D., & Choo, K. K. R. (2014). Data reduction and data mining framework for digital forensic evidence: storage, intelligence, review and archive.