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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

Better to just leave it on and at home, maybe have it stream some movies/series from Netflix or something, that way it would even serve as an alibi.

"Never left my house, spend the whole evening watching XY on my phone in bed, you can check the content providers logs!".

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... prop it up on your bed at a good viewing angle and have something lightly vibrate the bed periodically ...

That way the damn things accelerometer has some data - Law & Order style shows need to up their game in the smartphone era.

This could work, but if not then you’ve handed the prosecutors ironclad evidence of your premeditation.

Well, yeah, but the phone is going to tattle anyway you look at it. Frankly, the advice is more useful to people who are worried about being tracked than an idiot planning murder. I get the feeling a domestic abuse case is going to be a better bet to use this technique to buy time to get away before we see someone try to hide a murder. Those child tracking tech items are probably going to be a gold mine for abusive partners.

I know it's implied in your comment, but I hope that upon discovering someone was playing Netflix at home and not watching it, that the conclusion is still only "he was not at home while his Netflix is playing" and not "he put on Netflix to premeditate a murder." If he lies and says he was at home then that's perjury, which only may be evidence of premeditation.

I know this whole thread was tongue-in-cheek, but when someone's life is on the line for murder you do need to remember that you're trying to prove that a person did it, and it's not sufficient to disprove the ways that they didn't do it.

Hypothetically, if police caught your periodic-vibration setup in action, and figured out what it's meant for, and found some kind of evidence that you had just recently created this setup, and turned it on before leaving the house and (according to other evidence) committing a homicide…

Well, I don't know about "ironclad", but it would be circumstantial evidence that you were trying to cover something up, which in combination with other evidence might be able to establish premeditation.

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