The Rittenhouse defence has requested a mistrial after the prosecution just admitted that they sent the defence only a compressed copy of the drone video.
This whole issue has been rather an eye opener. Really the judge I don't mind being technically inept because his job is to study those huge law books, but there needs to be better use and understanding of the tech in the process.
A detective air dropped the file to the prosecution but then emailed a copy to the defence, and they where all oblivious to the fact that this would compress the video. Originally the prosecution blamed the defence since they where sure they sent the full video, it must have been the recipient who compressed it. Eventually they admitted it was compressed by their side, but they where unaware at the time. The defence did not know that they had received a lower quality video and they argue that they would have done things a little differently had they received the full quality video, so they ask for a mistrial.
The whole thing is painful to watch from a technology perspective. They had to debate for 2 hours about if they where going to let the jury view the videos, should they view them in court room or in private, how many times can they watch them? Do they use windows media player? No VLC player. Ok how do you spell that?
Even the process of watching videos in the courtroom was painful. Like "play video x now, ok pause there, no go back a bit, thats too far, ok play it anyway, stop, can you slow it down and zoom in? No, ok back up again lets review again."
It seems to me thay there is a lot of low hanging fruit here, to improve this process, from evidence handling to court room presentation.
What's most painful is that an email client would silently degrade files sent with it. A typical case of "we know better than the user". Which client did they use?
I've only been following this case casually, so I might be wrong, but didn't the prosecution spend a ton of time arguing about image resizing algorithms / digital zoom and how that makes some of the video evidence questionable? You would think they'd be savvy to this compression as a result, no?
That was a totally separate issue, that was about additional enhancement of the video.
This is about the original video being shared as low quality to the defence but then shown in high quality to the court. So the defence did not get to review that evidence.
A detective air dropped the file to the prosecution but then emailed a copy to the defence, and they where all oblivious to the fact that this would compress the video. Originally the prosecution blamed the defence since they where sure they sent the full video, it must have been the recipient who compressed it. Eventually they admitted it was compressed by their side, but they where unaware at the time. The defence did not know that they had received a lower quality video and they argue that they would have done things a little differently had they received the full quality video, so they ask for a mistrial.
The whole thing is painful to watch from a technology perspective. They had to debate for 2 hours about if they where going to let the jury view the videos, should they view them in court room or in private, how many times can they watch them? Do they use windows media player? No VLC player. Ok how do you spell that?
Even the process of watching videos in the courtroom was painful. Like "play video x now, ok pause there, no go back a bit, thats too far, ok play it anyway, stop, can you slow it down and zoom in? No, ok back up again lets review again."
It seems to me thay there is a lot of low hanging fruit here, to improve this process, from evidence handling to court room presentation.