Your phone goes with you everywhere. When you are without it, you miss it as much as you would a body part that temporarily becomes nonfunctional. It follows, then, that if you are facing criminal charges, your cell phone was present at the scene of the crime. Its absence would arouse as much suspicion as its presence would, if not more, as if it were an accomplice trying desperately to establish its own alibi. Prosecutors would argue that, by leaving your phone at home, you were trying to establish plausible deniability about whether you were where prosecutors say you were during the timeline that they are trying to persuade the jury. 

In almost every kind of criminal case, from financial crimes to drug trafficking to sexual offenses, both the prosecution and the defense rely on evidence gathered from the smartphones of defendants and witnesses. Your phone can rat you out, or it can establish reasonable doubt. One of the most helpful things you can do with your smartphone is to exercise your Sixth Amendment rights and contact a Tulsa criminal defense lawyer.

My Phone the Snitch

We have all heard stories about boastful selfies published to defendants’ social media accounts, where illicit drugs were in plain sight. Those are only the most egregious examples of one’s own phone being a source of incriminating evidence.

When a defendant pleads not guilty in a criminal case, thereby agreeing to have a jury determine the verdict at trial, the case proceeds to the pretrial discovery phase. The prosecution must disclose to the defendant’s criminal defense lawyer all the evidence that it plans to present at trial. This way, the defense has a chance to form its defense and to argue that the evidence leaves room for reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt.

When the evidence consists of phones or videos from your phone, there is often more than one possible interpretation. If you have a photograph of someone else’s driver’s license, for example, it does not always constitute evidence that you meant to steal the person’s identity or otherwise use the person’s identifying information without the person’s consent. You might also be able to argue that the person asked you to photograph their driver’s license for a plausible reason. Likewise, photographs and location tracking data show where you were and when, but they do not show you why. In certain types of cases, text messages are an important piece of evidence. If you lied to someone in a text message, it does not prove that you were trying to defraud the recipient. You might have believed that what you were saying was true, or perhaps you were saying it as a joke, and both you and the recipient knew that it was false.

Contact Tracy Tiernan About Criminal Defense Cases

A criminal defense lawyer can help you if you are facing criminal charges for offenses where evidence from your cell phone could be used against you. Contact Tracy Tiernan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to discuss your case.

Sources

 https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-22/section-22-2002/