With the advent of electronic discovery, emails and web pages are now common and fertile areas of discovery.\u00a0 However, until its 2014-2015 term, the Rhode Island Supreme Court had not addressed the means by which emails and web pages may be authenticated for introduction into evidence at trial.<\/p>\n
In O\u2019Connor v. Newport Hospital<\/em>, 111 A.3d 317 (R.I. 2015), the Rhode Island Supreme Court was called upon to address this issue of first impression and, in doing so, concluded that the proponents of the evidence had failed to make the threshold showing necessary to authenticate the evidence at trial.\u00a0 Id<\/em>. at 324-25.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court began its analysis with Rhode Island Rule of Evidence 901(a), which provides: \u201c\u2018The requirement of authentication or identification as a condition precedent to admissibility is satisfied by evidence to support a finding that the matter in question is what the proponent claims.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Id<\/em>. at 323 (quoting R.I. R. Evid. 901(a)).\u00a0 While \u201cauthentication is not a high hurdle to clear,\u201d it is well established that a trial justice must determine \u201cwhether there is enough support in the record to conclude that it is \u2018reasonably probable\u2019 that the evidence is what the offer proclaims it to be.\u201d\u00a0 Id<\/em>.<\/p>\n Applying these standards, the Rhode Island Supreme Court held that an email may be authenticated in a number of different ways, including the following:<\/p>\n In O\u2019Connor<\/em>, no attempt had been made to authenticate the email at issue through any of these means.\u00a0 Id<\/em>.\u00a0 Rather, the email was introduced through a witness who was neither the sender nor the recipient of the email and who merely recited the identity of the purported sender of the email and summarized the email\u2019s contents.\u00a0 Id<\/em>.\u00a0 Thus, the Court held that the trial justice had abused his discretion by admitting the email into evidence.\u00a0 Id<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court also analyzed the means by which printouts of web pages may be authenticated.\u00a0 In doing so, the Supreme Court relied on commentary on Rule 901 of the substantially similar Federal Rules of Evidence, which instructs that a printout of a web page may be authenticated by offering evidence that:<\/p>\n (1) The printout accurately reflects the computer image of the web page as of a specified date; (2) the website where the posting appears is owned or controlled by a particular person or entity; and (3) the authorship of the web posting is reasonably attributable to that person or entity.\u00a0 Evidence that may corroborate these points could include testimony of others who saw the posting on the website, continuation of the posting on the website so that it is available to be seen by the court, or evidence that the party to whom the posting is attributed made similar postings or published the same information elsewhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Id<\/em>. at 324 (quoting Christopher B. Mueller and Laird C. Kirkpatrick, 5 Federal Evidence \u00a7 9:9 (4th ed.) (database updated May 2014)).<\/p>\n Alternatively, the printouts of the web pages can be authenticated through a witness with personal knowledge to testify to the source of the exhibits.\u00a0 Id<\/em>. (citing United States v. Bansal<\/em>, 663 F.3d 634, 667 (3d Cir. 2011) (holding that screenshots from a website were properly authenticated when the proponent of the evidence called a witness who explained the website\u2019s archival process and testified, based on personal knowledge, that the screenshots were authentic).<\/p>\n Finally, printouts of web page content that is still available on the Internet may be authenticated by having a witness testify that (or a trial judge make findings that) the printout accurately reflects the content that appears on the Internet.\u00a0 Id<\/em>.<\/p>\n In O\u2019Connor<\/em>, no attempt to authenticate the printouts of the website was made and the trial justice did not make any findings with respect to the authenticity of the printouts.\u00a0 Id<\/em>. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that the admission of the printouts into evidence was clearly erroneous.\u00a0 Id<\/em>. at 324-35.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the advent of electronic discovery, emails and web pages are now common and fertile areas of discovery.\u00a0 However, until its 2014-2015 term, the Rhode Island Supreme Court had not addressed the means by which emails and web pages may be authenticated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[73,74],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evidence","tag-authentication","tag-evidence"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apslaw.com\/on-appeal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Authentication of Emails<\/h2>\n
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Authentication of Printouts of Web Pages<\/h2>\n