Commonwealth v. Caruso

The court’s reasoning

The examiner carefully explained how each program worked, including how stored settings and data caused the victim's information to display by default, and the defendant offered no evidence to the contrary. On timestamps, jurors may rely on common experience that computer time-keeping is accurate absent record evidence otherwise. The screen shots failed on relevance rather than reliability: because the examiner did not know whether the defendant had ever accessed the information depicted, they had no tendency to make a material fact more or less probable.

From the opinion

“McLean's testimony sufficiently demonstrated how the software worked.”

Grounds argued

This ruling turned on 3 of the eight arguments that recur across the docket. Each is defined the same way on every entry, so the same ground can be followed across rulings that reached opposite results.

Tool reliability

Whether the software or hardware used — an imaging tool, a carving engine, an extraction platform — produces accurate results, and whether the examiner can say how that is known. Courts rarely require a tool to be validated from first principles, but they do expect the examiner to know its limits.

Authentication

Whether the proponent can show the electronic record is what it is claimed to be, under Rule 901 or a state analogue. Rule 901(b)(9) — describing a process or system and showing it produces an accurate result — is where a forensic examiner's foundation testimony usually lands.

Fit to the issue

Whether the opinion helps decide a fact actually in issue. Testimony can be entirely reliable and still be excluded because it answers a question the case does not ask.

Practice note

The records behind this ruling

The evidence this ruling turned on has a page in the forensic artifact index, which states what that record proves and — the half that decides Rule 702 motions — what it cannot. The court did not use these names; almost none of them do, which is part of why the reliability question reaches a judge at all.

• $MFT (MASTER FILE TABLE)

Terms used on this page

Every term below is defined in the forensic glossary — what it is, why a case turns on it, and what happens in the matter when it is mishandled.

• TIMESTAMP

Rulings on the same grounds

One ruling is not a rule. These are the other entries in the docket argued on the same grounds, most-cited first — including the ones that came out the other way, which are the ones worth reading before relying on this entry for anything.

• The Daubert Docket

  All 55 rulings, filterable by ground, outcome and court, with the distribution across the three outcomes reported up front.

• Daubert and digital evidence

  The argument this docket is the evidence for: why an opinion stated one level too strongly is an admissibility problem under Rule 702(d).

• Daubert Exposure Check

  Twelve questions about an expert's methodology, mapped to the failure modes these rulings keep finding, with the remediation for each gap.

• Daubert or Frye?

  Which reliability test your forum applies — settle that before relying on a ruling from another jurisdiction.

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Attorney advertising / expert services. Each entry summarises a decision as it appeared in the opinion linked from that entry, on the day the entry was written. Decisions are reversed, vacated, superseded, and distinguished, and the text of Federal Rule of Evidence 702 was itself amended effective 1 December 2023 — check the current status and subsequent history of any ruling before relying on it. Nothing here is legal advice, none of it is a prediction about how any court will rule, and it is not a substitute for the rules, standing orders and case law of your own forum.