In every single criminal trial in this country, whether the crime is petty theft or murder or anything in between, there are very clear standards that deal with video evidence. In particular, if the government wants to introduce video evidence, they have to provide all of the available footage that they have. It’s a pretty intuitive concept. So if someone robs a convenience store, and the police recover surveillance tapes from the store, then they need to turn those tapes over to the defense. The prosecution can’t modify the tapes in any way. They can’t splice different tapes together. They certainly can’t delete anything. They have to provide the raw, unedited footage to the defense team. And on top of that, they have to verify that the tapes are authentic, and that they haven’t been tampered with, by establishing a sworn chain of custody. This is about as basic as it gets. Every judge in the country — even Ketanji Brown Jackson — can grasp this very straightforward concept. You can easily get a case thrown out of traffic court if they won’t give you all of the relevant footage they have.
On the other hand, when it comes to the single most-watched sex trafficking case in the history of the United States, this rule apparently does not apply. You can forget about “chain of custody.” And you can forget about obtaining raw footage as well. Instead, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the DOJ produced a video that was clearly manipulated. As we’ve discussed previously, WIRED Magazine found that the footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell — which the DOJ claimed was “raw” footage — had actually been edited and saved multiple times back in May of this year. Specifically, “the file was assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website.” Additionally, viewers noticed that there was a glitch when the timer in the footage moved from 11:58 to 11:59 p.m.; it seemed to jump ahead to midnight.
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