My Time as an Expert Witness

Quite a few years ago I had my first experience as an expert witness. My grandfather had a law practice at the time and needed help with one of his criminal defenses. His client had been caught cheating on his wife and so naturally the wife kicked him out. Afterwards she went through his computer looking for any other activities that she might be able to use in a court of law to make his life miserable. She found a lot of pornography and some of it happened to be illegal. There were 7 images that could put my grandfather's client in jail.

I had the job of coming up with a plausible defense. Fortunately I had an idea of how to create reasonable doubt. The guy's soon-to-be former wife taught computer science at a major university. She had the knowledge of how to change the computer's clock, download an illegal image or two, and then change the clock back to the current time. All I needed to do was prove that the poor guy got framed. I never needed to look at any of the images which worked for me as I never wanted to see them. I just looked at the creation timestamps for each of the images in question. The 7 bad images all appeared on the computer within a 2-minute period and had creation dates that didn't match when the husband would have been at home. In fact, he would have been at work and that information could be verified through his employer.

Basically the wife had framed her husband but didn't do that great a job because she set the computer's clock to a time when he wasn't at home. I had my defense all prepared and was ready to go to court and help this poor guy. Then I learned that nobody ever wants to go to court and so my grandfather's client has struck a deal with the prosecutor and I was no longer needed.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago and my wife came to me with a similar case. My wife works for a local law firm and I need to be careful about privacy so I can't go into too many details. This time I would be working for the wife that discovered her husband cheating on her. This time the wife is pretty sure her soon-to-be ex-husband likes to view pornography and wanted someone to check if there might be any illegal images on his computer.

I have to be honest, I really dreaded this second case. I am not someone that views pornography and know how addictive it can be. I didn't want to have to spend my time going through movies or images and so I had a plan to simply identify questionable content and work with the wife to have her determine if it is legal or not.

The computer arrived at my house and I sat down with my wife to start going through it. I pulled out my video camera and directed it to the screen so that should I need to have anyone review the steps I took, I would have a visual record. I turned the computer on and it wouldn't boot. I ran through a few troubleshooting tips but ultimately couldn't get the computer to come up enough to do anything useful. Ultimately the wife will have to have someone get the computer in working order before anyone can search for illegal images.

I doubt I would have found anything of interest on this latest computer. For my first case, Internet speeds were slow and so people would collect images on their hard disks. Now those speeds have increased and it is easy to watch a streaming movies (clean or otherwise). About the best I could have hoped for is going through the browser history and seeing which websites have been visited. Of course, that assumes that the husband wasn't smart enough to use the incognito mode. Times certainly have changed.