The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today that while printouts of alleged e-mail correspondence are not enough by themselves to convict a man of soliciting an underage prostitute online, the fact that he showed up at the specific assignation time and place mentioned in the messages is.
At issue were 37 pages of printouts of alleged e-mail correspondence between a man and somebody he thought was a 15-year-old prostitute advertising on Craigslist - who turned out to be a state trooper who specializes in ferreting out such people online.
Jeremy Amaral's lawyers argued there was no way to prove he was actually the correspondent, or that the "Jeremy Amaral" his e-mail provider (Yahoo) said had set up the account used for the exchange was actually him. Also, the lawyers argued, the printouts violated the long-held "best evidence" rule, in which a copy of something is held to be of less legal value than the original.
The court agreed - up to a point. Yes, somebody could easily use somebody else's name to set up an e-mail account, the court said, continuing, however, that Amaral did himself in: Whoever wrote the e-mail agreed to meet the "teen" at a specific time at a specific strip mall, which is just what Amaral did - at which point he was arrested.
It appears patently clear that in the computer age, one may set up a totally fictitious e-mail account, falsely using the names and photographs of others. One could have set up an account improperly using the name and photograph of the defendant. Here, the Commonwealth painstakingly presented its case, introducing a number of documentary exhibits, many of which used the name of the defendant. It was not, however, in this case at least, until the defendant appeared as planned in the e-mail communications, expecting to meet and have sex with a fifteen year old prostitute, that his guilt was established.
The court also denied his lawyer's assertions under the "best evidence" rule, which dates back hundreds of years, and which, in this case, would have required the trooper to produce the actual hard drive used by Yahoo to store the exchange.
Noting Massachusetts courts had already overturned "best evidence" for digital photographs, the court said:
That somehow the best evidence is found in the Yahoo servers is doubtful, as is the need to bring in the computer drive itself. ... "[T]he significance of the best evidence rule has declined appreciably in recent decades. The rule predates the invention of photocopy machines and computers, and also the modern discovery rules."
