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Comment by ImJamal | Hacker News Reader

First, you are moving the goal posts. You were first talking about a person committing a crime and now you are talking about being aware of a crime.

Second, you only have to be aware that the police consider your phone to be evidence of a crime, which he was aware of, not have knowledge about the crime itself.

I don't think you understand the situation.

The feds told him they suspected evidence to be on the phone. He can't plead ignorance. He knew they thought there was evidence of a crime and gave them the duress code.

If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...

If you read the law you would know you have no clue what you are talking about.

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The so-called goalposts haven't moved. If anything I keep leading you to a place where you can score, only to have you keep kicking it into the corner for some reason. The goal is not over there, never was. And I don't think it's my fault you're disoriented. But it may help you to have it pointed out that I'm not strictly talking about this one guy who erased his phone. I'm talking about the circularity of evidence-destruction laws.

> You were first talking about a person committing a crime and now you are talking about being aware of a crime.

You must have me confused with someone else then. All of my words RE: crime are as follows:

had a crime been charged

you've committed no crime

aware of a crime

you have committed no crime

charged with a crime

presuming guilt for the crime

At no time have I talked about someone who has committed a crime. Part of the reason for that is that legally speaking, no one has committed a crime, unless and until evidence and due process have established the fact. Being guilty of a crime is a non-existent condition before such time. (Obviously we can talk about such a condition in everyday conversation, but I'm talking about what goes in the public record.) This also means "the crime" does not exist and "the evidence" also does not exist, hence my initial question, evidence of what?

But a charge can exist, an assertion. The moment the charge is made by an officer of the court (or yes, even the suspicion and subsequent investigation), that is the moment when "ordinary personal property" turns into "evidence" subject to evidence-destruction laws. It is as simple as one person declaring it to be so. Given that this can happen for invalid reasons (such as wrongful accusation of someone as persecution for exercising his First Amendment rights as in this case), or for no reason at all, the potential for injustice is high. The fact that "knowingly" and "intent" are written into the laws is a good thing, but insufficient to make them just, in my opinion.

On a personal note, for you to be such a dick at the end of your comment is of course against the site guidelines but is also ironic given your own apparent inability to get my point (i.e. it's you who doesn't know what I'm talking about, not me), and your demonstrated cognitive inflexibility, poor reading skills and apparent inexperience with truths most Americans hold to be self-evident.

If a person did not know the phone had potential evidence then he wouldn't have intended or knowingly destroyed evidence and as such wouldn't be guilty of the crime...

He is not guilty of the crime, even today, and remains innocent unless and until due process establishes it.

I don't think you understand the situation in this case. The person very clearly knew his phone was believed to have evidence of a crime. He then destroyed the evidence on the phone. This is one of the most clear cases of destruction of evidence there is. The only hope he has is to use the fact that he was denied his lawyer.

Now to show you are moving the goal posts, go back to one of your previous posts and read "Had a crime been charged when the search was undertaken?" and another one "how are you supposed to know when your own property is evidence and when it's not, when you've committed no crime?"

You clearly were trying to make a claim that a crime needs to be charged to be destruction of evidence.

You are guilty of committing a crime regardless if you are found guilty. If I murder somebody and I am not found guilty in a court would you say I am not guilty of committing the crime of murder?

I'm not going to address anything else since it is a complete waste of time discussing this with you.

A crime not having been committed, one of the chief ways you would find out that something is "evidence" is by someone charging you with a crime, as I said, and notice that I do not claim that's the ONLY way to find out. But "finding out" i.e. knowing, is required, for the crime of destruction of evidence to be on the table, as you said. This part of the point doesn't apply to the Tunick case, as I said. RE being colloquially guilty of a crime, "Obviously we can talk about such a condition in everyday conversation," as I said.

It's fine if you want to disengage; I've certainly had much more stimulating discussions, where it actually went somewhere, like a dance.

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