> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.

You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.

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sidewndr46 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

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pseudo0 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.

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throwway120385 3 hours ago | parent [-]

For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.

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jjk166 an hour ago | parent [-]

At the same time though, a bunch of people who know each other and the people allegedly involved could very easily share the same incorrect testimony. You wouldn't believe in bigfoot if 5 guys drinking beers swore they saw him while they were camping. Sending someone to prison or worse is much higher stakes. DNA evidence might be too extreme, but I'd expect some sort of evidence to back up a testimony. "What if the witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.

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DiscourseFan 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.

	▲	jjk166 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Or perhaps the standards of evidence established for a pre-industrial society when eye-witness testimony was the best that could reasonably be achieved is not necessarily the optimal system for a digital society where everyone carries a high definition video camera in their pocket at all times.

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alwa 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?

As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?

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sidewndr46 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're missing the slippery slope that this goes down. The criminal charges were way too low, given the alleged actions. The state admitted it had absolutely no forensic evidence. The judge was perfectly fine with this and selecting a jury that was OK convicting in this circumstance. This pretty quickly pretty us down a path of "you're guilty of at least one crime since you've been indicted, maybe a more serious one if we have some evidence".

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brookst 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Does that mean that every single conviction from before the days of forensic evidence is necessarily invalid?

If the argument is that forensic evidence decreases uncertainty, well, it certainly doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

Convicting anyone of anything is a slippery slope. The only way to be truly sure is to never do it, ever.

	▲	sidewndr46 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The case was a shooting. It seemed remarkable they had neither a gun, spent cartridge cases, blood, flesh, wounds, or anything in the way of physical evidence.

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vkou 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.

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jotux 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect

Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?

	▲	kube-system 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure. A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
	▲	autoexec 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.

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IncreasePosts 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's no indication that this guy had to hire a lawyer or actually do anything. The same location data that put him near the scene/time of the crime would also absolve him. I guess it's sad that he felt the need to pay for a lawyer.

	▲	autoexec 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago. A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect. He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.