How are pictures used in court when it is getting increasingly getting easier to alter them
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The general rule is that no piece of “real evidence” gets admitted unless a person takes the stand and testifies under oath what it is and where it came from. Sometimes it requires more than one witness to do that. For example one witness finds the gun. Another witness tests the gun and matches it to the bullet. A third witness says “yeah I’m the guy who sold that gun to the accused.”
Photographs are no different from any other piece of evidence. Somebody has to show when it was taken. That might just be a person testifying “yes I took that photo of the accused pointing the gun at the deceased moments before I heard the gunshot.” For things like security footage from a bank, it’s a bit more complicated.
A photo can be tampered with, just as the gun, or the examination can be tampered with, or the bullet, or anything else. But when a person takes the stand to say “I took that photo and it accurately shows what I saw”, then it is going into evidence. If the other party wants to argue that it has been tampered with, then they can go ahead and do so. But whatever they do, that only goes to the evidence’s value, not its admissibility.
All evidence is subject to “weight”, as in how reliable is this piece of evidence. That is for the judge or jury to decide. But it’s worth knowing that there are few pieces of real evidence that are less reliable than most humans who take the stand and testify as to what they saw. We still allow people to take the stand and give their evidence, despite knowing that you can’t really completely rely on it.
I’ve been a lawyer for 27 years. I have seen things that would make you shake your head, and I’ve been the witness (not literally, I never had to testify) whose memory was just plain wrong. It’s just shocking how the mind can screw up in an emotionally charged situation.
We all do the best we can despite all the frailties, and most of us look forward to the things that will help us do it better. But boy oh boy, we all have some pretty good stories about evidence that let us down.
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