The impact of acceptance of electronic evidence before and after the 2006 Federal Rules of Evidence on criminal cases

Legal scholars have established that the U.S. Department of Justice's 2004 Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) has created confusion in legal rulings on criminal cases involving digital evidence, resulting in conflicting verdicts. With the 2006 FRE update, the Department of Justice attempted to correct the problem. The conceptual framework for this study was established through a synthesis of Casey's and Kerr's contemporary perspectives on forensic and digital evidence. The fundamental research questions were whether the guidance provided by the 2006 release of the FRE contributed to an increase in the number of criminal cases, acceptance rate of digital evidence, conviction rate, and acceptance of plea bargain, or affected the type of evidence presented in criminal cases. In this quantitative quasi-experimental interrupted time series comparative study, the admissibility of digital evidence in the Second Judicial District Court of a western U.S state was examined, based on criminal cases presented before and after the 2006 update to the FRE. Criminal cases were obtained from public records to determine the type of evidence presented at the trial. The analysis of the data using Student's t-test suggest an increase in the acceptance of digital evidence in criminal cases and in the acceptance of plea bargains by the defendant when digital evidence is admitted in the trial. This study can contribute to social change by clarifying the rules for accepting digital evidence in trials, which in turn can provide a foundation for a more equitable adjudication of criminal cases for both victims and defendants.