Military court finds Facebook messages authenticated

The United States Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals held in United States v. Grant, 2011 CCA LEXIS 217 (A.F. Ct. Crim. App. 2011) that Facebook correspondence admitted into evidence in a court-martial proceeding were properly authenticated by testimony from the recipient. As I discussed here, authenticating messages from Facebook can be a tricky process.

The court listed several reasons for its decision:

• Messages contained the defendant's name and profile picture
• A witness testified that:
• She had just met the defendant when he requested her to be his friend
• He gave her his cell phone number, and they used it to text message each other
• She and the defendant made plans over Facebook messaging

While the appellate court used the testimony to authenticate the messages, usually this is done with the evidence itself. It contained unique information (Commonwealth v. Purdy, 945 N.E.2d 372 (Mass. 2011)), and the continued conversations through the defendant's cell phone and making plans properly connected the defendant to the Facebook conversation (Commonwealth v. Amaral, 78 Mass. App. Ct. 671 (2011)).

RELATED CASE: In State v. Mosley, 2011 Wash. App. LEXIS 2644 (2011), the court upheld authentication of photos that were printed from MySpace because an officer recognized the people in the picture. Some courts have not been so trusting, such as People v. Lenihan, 911 N.Y.S.2d 588 (2010) which declined to do so because of the ability to "photoshop" images.