According to sources, video evidence plays a crucial role in approximately 80% of criminal cases. However, presenting digital evidence in court can be daunting, and you will be under a lot of stress. Due to this stress, you may make some mistakes that can affect the admissibility of your video evidence. If the opposing legal party finds out any shortcomings in your evidence, they will try to dismantle the entire case.
As a leading video forensic consultant in Florida, we have prepared a guide to help you ensure video evidence admissibility.
Does Your Video Qualifies as Evidence?
The first thing you need to ensure is that your video qualifies as evidence for legal proceedings. Here are the conditions that you must meet:
- The video is relevant to your cases
- It proves a crime has occurred
- It accurately represents all events that took place
Prepare a Chain of Custody
A chain of custody is crucial for video evidence admissibility. Failing to maintain a chain of custody not only makes your evidence inadmissible but also gives an edge to the opposing legal team to dismantle the case.
To prepare a chain of custody, you need to record details of everyone who comes into contact with the video evidence.
Verify the Authenticity of the Evidence
Before presenting your video evidence to the court or the jury, you must ensure its legitimacy and authenticity. Rule out any possibility of the video being fake, tampered with, or manipulated. To do this, you can hire our forensic video analysis services to identify whether a video is authentic or has been tampered with.
We will also check the metadata of the file to give you valuable information, including the location where it was shot.
Sort the Video According to Relevancy
Make sure you sort the evidence according to its relevancy to the case. Instead of bringing the entire video footage, pick out instances showing concrete proof of the crime. Our video forensic expert can help you with this too. They will extract useful clips from your video evidence without tampering with it so you have the most relevant footage to show to the jury.
At Eclipse Forensics, we offer a wide range of digital forensic services, including video analysis, authenticate audio forensics, image redaction, computer forensics, etc. Contact us to discuss your needs with us, our forensic consultants would be happy to help you.
