Communication Privacy Management and Digital Evidence in an Intimate Partner Violence Case

Abstract

This article uses a case study of an intimate partner violence criminal case to examine the<br/ >relationship among communication privacy management, evidence acquisition and<br/ >retrieval, and the use of digital evidence in criminal court. We followed the case of Krista<br/ >and Alex (pseudonyms) for a period of four months from August 2017 to November 2017.<br/ >Data were collected from observations in two locations: the digital forensics laboratory of<br/ >the public defender who handled the case and the courtroom in which the trial took place.<br/ >Findings indicate that the couple engaged in preemptive and after-the-fact privacy<br/ >management strategies, which complicated the process of acquiring digital evidence and<br/ >had implications for how the evidence was used at trial. The case study joins<br/ >communication privacy management and legal research to show why digital evidence falls<br/ >short as a “model witness” and may expose female complainants to greater privacy<br/ >turbulence than male defendants.