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Insider-Trading Suspects Smash Hard Drive Evidence
An anonymous reader writes "We all know Slashdotters love debating the best way to wipe a hard drive clean. Looks like tech-savvy Wall Street Hedge Fund managers also know the best way to do it. From the WSJ article: 'Mr. Longueuil's version of that night's events was recorded later, during a December meeting with former colleague Mr. Freeman, who by then was cooperating with the government and recording conversations, according to the U.S. complaint. "F—in' pulled the external drives apart," Mr. Longueuil told Mr. Freeman during their meeting, according to the criminal complaint. "Put 'em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket, and leave the apartment and I go on like a twenty block walk around the city and try to find a, a garbage truck and threw the s—t in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks four different garbage trucks."'"
So what do we learn kids? Don't talk about the skeezy shit you do to anyone: friend, family, coworker, or other. If you do bad shit, keep it to yourself.
At the small town bars I used to hang out in we had a saying, "Loose lips get hit."
It would appear that the hammer of justice follows a similar rule of thumb.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
IANAL; but my understanding is that it doesn't constitute an admission of guilt per se(particularly in these days of high-capacity hard drives, there would be no reasonable way to bound the number of things you could have been guilty of with just one HDD...); but, destruction of evidence and/or "obstruction of justice" are typically crimes in themselves.
If they have a recording of you describing how you ripped apart and surreptitiously disposed of your HDD after you heard that the feds were on your trail, those charges are going to be very hard to dodge...
Merely destroying your hard drive, out of caution or paranoia, and then learning later that the feds would really have liked to have a look through it, is one thing; but if you are caught on tape describing why you destroyed it, game over, man.
if they prove deliberate destruction of evidence, doesn't that constitute admission of guilt? or some other loss-by-default?
No, but it does allow the prosecutor to give the jury instructions that they may make a adverse inference[1] as to the contents of the destroyed relevant evidence from the fact that the defendant knowingly (sometimes even negligently) destroyed it. Essentially, they are telling the jury that they can infer that the evidence would weaken the defendant's case from the fact that he willfully destroyed it.[2] The jury is not required to make such an inference but it may -- as contrasted from the fact that prosecutors are forbidden from trying to make adverse inferences from a refusal to testify based on 5A grounds, such jury instructions would be illegal and the whole conviction overturned.
This is a very onerous instruction and so is reserved for cases in which it was shown that the destruction was knowing or negligent but it's necessary in order for the discovery system to work. In the absence of a adverse inference rule, litigants would have a very strong incentive to preemptively destroy any incriminating evidence as soon as they became aware of an investigation or a lawsuit. In cases against corporations in which internal emails/documents play a pivotal role in proving that the behavior was part of a pattern/policy of the company (and not merely a rogue employee) this would be fatal to the plaintiff/State. The same logic applies in cases against the State[3] where they refuse to disclose evidence that might be favorable to the defendant.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
[2] http://vegaslitigator.com/blog/?cat=50 (discussing the Nevada statute, not the Federal one, but many parallels and the same basic concepts exist).
[3] http://legalholds.typepad.com/legalholds/2009/04/negligent-destruction-of-evidence-is-sufficient-to-support-an-adverse-inference-instruction-although.html An interesting case in which police destruction of evidence helps to get defendants off the hook because they allege that the destroyed evidence would undermine the State's case. IOW, the adverse-inference doctrine cuts both for and against the State. The defendants did eventually convince the court that the radio communications were relevant.