• stifle867@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    How do judges normally treat destruction of evidence? Do they not care who committed the crime and just make a ruling on how to infer it? I feel like the court would want to know who has committed something as serious as this but I’m not sure of the actual process for it.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Don’t worry about it. He’ll totally deal with it outside his formal judicial capacity, after letting them off with a slap on the wrist… “in his own time” like some Hollywood renegade judge!

    • Revv@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      In federal court, a judge has a few options to deal with spoliation;

      Under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 37 possible sanctions are as follows:

      • dismissal of the wrongdoer’s claim;
      • entering judgment against the wrongdoer;
      • exluding expert testimony; and
      • application of adverse inference rule.

      The last of these basically allows the court to infer (or instruct the jury to infer) that the destroyed evidence was the most possibly damning thing and hold that against the party in question.

      Outside of the above, destruction of evidence is a crime. The judge has no power of investigation that I’m aware of, but maybe it just means informing those who have such power.