Digital evidence in appeal judgement transcripts
Findings from a study that explored the presence of digital evidence in appeal judgements as a proxy for changes in police investigations.
Applies to England and Wales
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We looked at Court of Appeal case transcripts from 2010 and 2018 and assessed them for references to digital evidence. We also collated information on the offence type, key dates, primary and secondary sources of digital evidence (mobile phone calls, cell-site analysis, texts, social media etc.) and the type of hardware the information was extracted from (mobile phone, hard disk, etc). We made a qualitative assessment of the evidential weight of the digital material based on the judgements.
We found there was a statistically significant increase in the proportion of appeal cases that contained references to digital evidence, up from 21% in 2010 to 34% in 2018. We found an increase across all high-level offence types – drugs, sexual offences, violence against the person, fraud, robbery, theft and miscellaneous crimes against society. For all offences combined, there was a decline in references to mobile phone calls and call data across the period. In contrast, there was a marked increase in digital evidence sourced from social media platforms, e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp. We found variations in the type of digital evidence across different offence types. Rape offences saw an increased proportion in cases referencing images, audio material and social media. For drug offences, the proportion of appeal cases referencing call records decreased in 2018, but there was an increase in the proportion of references to SMS data.