Video evidence is going to be inadmissible very soon.
It's ironic that we're essentially being pushed back to a pre-technology, pre-media time. "If you didn't see it with your own two eyes, you can't believe it"
It's ironic that we're essentially being pushed back to a pre-technology, pre-media time. "If you didn't see it with your own two eyes, you can't believe it"
https://jamespublishing.com/2013/objecting-video-audio-evide...
https://www.esquiresolutions.com/federal-rules-catch-digital...
Given what we know of human memory and visual processing, you'd be a damned fool to trust your own eyes any better.
As the technology improves and becomes accessible soon anybody will be able to edit videos convincingly without having to invest a massive amount of time or money. That's going to have a large impact I think.
So in that sense it could have still be done pretty cheap.
A better example would probably be the moon landing footage or 9/11. And then it's really only questioned by conspiracy theorists and specifically because a state actor might have wanted to hide the evidence of a conspiracy.
Tomorrow with this new technology I might not convince you that Bigfoot exists but I might be able to show you extremely convincing footage of Margaret Thatcher and Mao Zedong frolicking in the Swiss Alps while Tupac is watching.
I had no idea Mao and Tupac were friends.
We listened to Sirius 117 thru our ride and they always tell crime stories. It was a death row story and when the narrator said that the only evidence they had against a suspect was a DNA but it was enough to put him on electric chair, she chuckled a little. It was odd so I asked her why. As a court reporter she witnessed many horrors written by life, but this one was particularly scary for another reason. She was reporting on a case where the only evidence of a murder was a DNA, even though a suspect was in New York on a day where victim was murdered in Los Angeles. The DA rested case explaining that DNA evidence is enough and holds up in courts for many years and that they do not need to explain anything else, how he go from NY to LA at the night of murder or really nothing else mattered "because of DNA." So defended lawyers ran a suspect DNA via one of popular DNA-kit websites and to their surprise they found a good enough match. She was lucky to be called in when the case was heard again (most of the time different court reporter would be called in depending of availability) and they showed that result to DA/prosecutors asking if they would consider prosecuting based on that person DNA. They look at it and said it was the same person DNA. So defended lawyers revealed that it was different person. To judge shock, then DA came to say that DNA match doesn't have to be 100% and over the span of human existence some 100 billion people lived so its quite possible for extremely similar DNA to be found in wild. She recalls looking at judge face at that moment and he turned pale blue - you couldn't help to see this man wondering if over the span of last 2 decades, he may have sentenced hundreds of people based on inadequate evidence. The case did not ended there but shortly after when she was checking on it, the whole case all of sudden got sealed and even year later was still locked down. All she knows is that most likely he wasn't found guilty, as checking on his name recently did not yield any record on Cali's death row list.
So so much of DNA being of 100% proof.
Nothing changes.
It was always possible, but it used to be far more difficult.