kate_nepveu | Circumstantial Evidence

This morning, I was in Rochester to argue two cases. When there are a lot of cases on the calendar before mine, I do my best to pay attention to them: it keeps me awake, it's educational on a number of levels, and I'm not going to be able to concentrate on my own case during other people's arguments (I prepare ferociously ahead of time instead). Today, I was rewarded with an interesting set of facts, which I believe went something like this:

Criminal conviction for drug possession. Defendant had jumped out of a still-running car and run through a series of backyards. He was eventually arrested some distance away (I did not hear any of the distances). A bag of drugs was found on the ground near a fence, which defendant had jumped over; the jumping was the only time the pursuing officer lost sight of defendant. It was a cold snowy day, and there were only two sets of footprints in the backyard, defendant's and the officer's. The bag was warm to the touch.

Is that sufficient evidence to convict defendant of possession? Recall that possession must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

(I think one of the justices said it would make an interesting law school test question.)

Then when I got home, I found myself with another circumstantial evidence question, which amused me. The faucet in the back wall of the house was on. A quick call to Chad confirmed that he hadn't left the water running for some reason, so I went out and turned it off. The faucet turned easily, and there were pieces of icicles on the ground around it. I immediately concluded that a falling icicle had hit the faucet in just the right way to turn it on—which is perhaps somewhat more improbable than the case I heard this morning, but since the stakes are so much lower, I am perfectly happy to accept it.

Do you all have any interesting examples of circumstantial evidence? Or want to weigh in on these examples?

(Note to self: find a "lawyerly" icon.)

Threaded | Flat

I have to say, if I were on a jury for the posession case, I would vote to convict based on that evidence. It may be technically circumstantial, but the circumstances make it entirely reasonable.

I think I would want to drill down into this notion of "warm to the touch" and how it was determined.

I would have convicted on the warm bag case.

In the case where I was a jury member, we ended up deadlocking on two counts of possessing a stolen forklift and scissor lift. I felt that given that the property was in fact stolen, was found on a tow lot run by the defendant, was the sort of item that would be useful in his line of work, that other stolen property was also on the lot, that they had both been stolen right around the time when he took possession of the lot, that both were very valuable (so were unlikely to have been stolen and then immediately ditched, that he would have known their value due to his line of work, and that one of the lifts had been hotwired and its ID numbers scratched out, was sufficient to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt that he had either stolen it himself or he had at least known that it must have been stolen, if it had been on the lot before he took possession of it.

Exactly half the other jurors felt that it was possible that the lifts had been dumped on the lot prior to the defendants' possession of the lot, and that he had no idea where they came from.

wow, you have an interesting job

"You don't have to wonder," declared Encyclopedia. "Those are his drugs!"

How did Encyclopedia know the man had dropped the drugs? Turn to page 87 to find out.

Unrelatedly, shouldn't you have turned off the water to outside faucets for the winter?

I use circumstantial evidence frequently when trying to debug software problems. I've gotten particularly good at guessing the cause of a graphics bug just by eyeballing the crazy garbage on the screen.

It doesn't always work. If I can make intuitive leaps five or six steps ahead of what I can prove, I can often diagnose and fix bugs much faster than with a systematic approach to isolating the trouble--of course, I have to do some experiments to verify that I made the right guess. But every so often, I get burned by this approach, because I made a wrong assumption about how the code works or because a coincidence mimicked what I thought was significant. Then, I have to back up and proceed by more methodical baby steps, verifying every step in my deduction--and of course the whole process takes longer than if I had started with this approach in the first place. So there's an art to finding the optimum mix of provable deduction and intuitive induction from circumstantial evidence.

I just read this out loud to a friend and he immediately responded, "No." When I asked why not, he pointed out that absent any fingerprint evidence, there's no way to tell whether the defendant or the officer dropped the bag. Enough room for reasonable doubt.

I wouldn't convict on the drugs. A cop saying the bag was "warm to the touch" is a ridiculous piece of non-evidence. (And I've been on a convicting jury, so I'm not just a softie!)

Am I the only one who thinks that jumping out of your still-running car and sprinting away from cops, leaping fences, until you're dragged down, is the kind of thing that DOES tend to indicate that the drugs are yours?

That's the kind of thing that makes "the drugs were there to begin with" and "the drugs belonged to the cop" seem less likely, to me.

(More important than the temperature of the drug bag, I'd want to know how much snow was on them. If it's a cold snowy day, that should tell you how long the drugs were there before the cop found them.)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject