A Study On The Legal Status And Applicable Rules Of Electronic Evidence In Criminal Procedure Area

With the emerging of the 21 century information era, the use of electronic information has entered the household, the lives of ordinary people. In the modern society, people intentionally or unintentionally, are constantly using the electronic information or createing a new electronic information. The spread of electronic information naturally touched into the field of criminal justice as well; electronic evidence in criminal proceedings is also at an increasingly important position. However, this new evidence brought by the new technology brings a new challenge to the original theory of evidence based on its unique character, and also brought confusion to the judicial practice in criminal proceedings. Thus, in the present circumstances to accurately position the legal status of electronic evidence and to establish reasonable and effective the applicable rules about electronic evidence has become urgent theoretical problems in the academia.This article is divided into three parts, the main contents are as follows:The first part is of the legal status of electronic evidence, with introducing basic knowledge about electronic evidence, the existing theories on the positioning of electronic evidence. and then made detailed inquiries on each of the above theories of its controversies. On this basis, this paper advocated that electronic evidence should be given the status of independent evidence with illustrating the necessaties by verification and elaboration.The second part made some study on the applicable rules of electronic evidence. During this part, the paper introduced the relevency rules in U.S., authentication rules and the applicable Best evidence rules of electronic evidence and subsequently made comparisons with to the domestic theory on the identical area. At the same time the text relying on the cases of the United States introduced the practices of the heresay evidence exception rules on electronic evidence on the use of electronic evidence. Those contents provides an important reference for the construction of the relevant system of the applicable rules on electronic evidence.The third part, based on the discussion of first two, put forward reform proposals of electronic evidence rules in China's criminal procedure. First of all, as to the current confusion of the positioning of the electronic evidence, this paper proposed a clear indepent status for electronic evidence, while the indepent status still should be based on the modification of the relationships of the former categaries of evidence. And the paper provided the recommendations for improving the applicable rules of electronic evidence.Through the research, the paper concluded that in light of the important position of electronic evidence in criminal proceedings and its unique nature, to establish the independent legal status of electronic evidence in the legislation has been pretty necessary. The tests of the relevancy of the electronic evidence actually includes two layers of meaning: logical relevancy and pragmatic relevancy. Meanwhile, because electronic evidence is fragile and easy forgery and of other characteristics, the authentication work of it is an essential link for its use in proceedings. The authentication of electronic evidence requires not only the content of the information itself to be evidence, but also need more extrinsic foundation,that is to prove that the proof of facts to be proved, the electronic evidence itself need some other external evidence to support it. The best evidence rule in the case of electronic evidence is difficult to apply and the recognition of the same functionality of duplicated electronic evidence and the original copy of it is an inevitable choice for litigation practice. Not all the electronic evidence materials contain hearsay staff and even those which contain such things in some circumstances can be apllied as evidence by the hearsay exception rules as long as they meet the requirement of circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness.