Beyond the Bar
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Pages | 25 |
BEYOND THE BAR
Old Wine in a New Bottle
By Warren Moise
As we abandon our childhood technologies - pencil and paper - and leap for the computer keyboard to communicate, summary judgment hearings, trials, and sentencing hearings are being injected with questions of how this computer-generated stuff is admitted into evidence.
How important is it to have a working knowledge of electronic evidence? New Hampshire's Ethics Committee would pin a duty on lawyers to have some basic knowledge of social media as potential evidence.
Twelve years ago, I wrote two South Carolina Lawyer columns on admissibility of electronic evidence. At that time, there wasn't a tremendous body of law in South Carolina on this topic, and little has changed since then. However, we do now have an eloquent and clear South Carolina case on point, State v. Green, 427 S.C. 223 (Ct. App. 2019). Green is being appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. Whether upheld or reversed, it likely will provide some much-needed analysis on admissibility of electronic evidence.
Before getting started, let me note that one issue commonly arising in cases involving electronic communications is authentication. Proving authentication typically isn't a great evidentiary problem, but it has few wrinkles not found in other evidence contexts. (More on this later). Having said this, let's move onward to State v. Green.
State v. Green State v. Green was a murder prosecution (and also a prosecution for desecration of human remains) arising from Laurens County in May of 2016. The prosecution alleged that two defendants, Fabian Green and Karina Galarza (Facebook name: "Ruby Rina"), concocted a scheme to lure the young victim to Galarza's home with the promise of sex. After the victim arrived, Galarza pushed him into a bedroom. Green then struck the victim in the head several times with a hammer, killing him. Both were arrested after an investigation.
At trial, admissibility of two types of evidence were strongly contested:
First, a third defendant (who had witnessed and participated in the crimes) testified that Galarza's Facebook name was Ruby Rina and that Green and Ruby Rina had been posting on Facebook before the crimes were committed. The victim's father gave the victim's Facebook password to the investigating law-enforcement officers; the police then accessed the Facebook account and...
To continue reading
Request your trial