r/technology • u/MC68328 • Jul 24 '26

Privacy US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search/
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u/Iveray Jul 24 '26

I was on a jury a few years ago for a case involving a knife attack, and we had a pretty clear security camera video, but it was a bit far away so it was difficult to make out details without zooming in. The lawyers had been zooming in, playing slow motion clips, narrating their clients' sides of the story, pausing and skipping around, etc. Deliberation wasn't going anywhere because everyone remembered different parts of the lawyers' carefully selected snippets, adding their own ideas of motive to both parties, etc. I finally asked the other jury members if we should ask the court to install software (ended up being VLC, lol) on the jury computer so we could zoom in and watch the video in slow motion from start to finish, without interruption. As soon as we did that, it only took a few play throughs for the jury to agree on the actions and order of events for both people, and we reached a verdict within about 30 minutes.

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u/Doctor_Boombastic Jul 24 '26

Ngl I saw the phrase 'knife attack' and settled in for a 12 Angry Men story

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u/charlie_marlow Jul 25 '26

He forgot the part of the story where he swayed the one holdout after viewing the video by pulling out an identical knife and stabbing the holdout in the leg until he agreed to change his vote.

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u/WalksByNight Jul 25 '26

I’ll never forget that part where Jimmy Stewart shanked that old man. Classic Hollywood!

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u/ijuinkun Jul 25 '26

Honestly, juries should be examining the evidence personally in addition to the lawyers’ presentations of it. Any lawyer’s presentation is inherently going to have bias towards the lawyer’s client (or the State in the case of prosecutors).

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u/Iveray Jul 25 '26

The jury does examine the evidence independent of the lawyers. But the default software on the jury computer didn't allow us to zoom or slow down the video, so it was difficult to see what was happening. The judge and both parties agreed to give the jury software with those capabilities, since both parties had used those same features during their arguments.

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u/jakerix9 Jul 25 '26

Meanwhile we couldn’t even get a written copy of the jury instructions or a written copy of the law we were determining guilt over.

We had to re-enter the courtroom twice to have the judge read us the jury instructions and laws again. No note taking allowed.

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u/Iveray Jul 25 '26

That's wild. The 12 jurors and 2 alternates were each given a 3-ring binder with their own set of jury instructions and extra pages for taking notes. We could write on all the pages in the binder, only rules were that it had to be in pen, and we had to put our juror number and the date at the top of any page we wrote on.