[comp.society] Optical technology fails in courtroom

rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) (04/27/88)

The California courts recently abandoned an experimental effort to use
digital scanners and optical disk technology for storing and
retrieving legal documents.  The primary problem was the unwillingness
of witnesses to swear to the accuracy of documents presented to them
on a screen.  Under oath, with lots of money and perhaps criminal
liability at stake, witnesses were faced with deciding whether that
screen image really matched the documents they worked with a few years
ago.  Had a line been missed?  Were there any portions illegible that
should not have been?  Witnesses were not sure, and generally refused
to swear that the documents were accurate.  When presented with a
paper copy, they could read it, hold it, and were confident in
testifying that it was indeed the same document.  A secondary problem
was that the lawyers were not sure what to expect, so they always had
plenty of paper versions on hand in case something went wrong.
Between these two effects, the court found that the digitized
documents were useless.

I have not seen the system that was used, but from what I have seen of
other document scanning systems, I expect that the reproduction
quality was excellent.  The key difficulty is witness uncertainty.
Consider how would you react if you faced huge fines and bankruptcy
if you made a mistake in assessing whether a scanned picture really
matched a document that you worked on several years ago.

Rob  Horn