KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Technology is tracking us nearly everywhere we go. Now, it's increasingly at the forefront of criminal trials.
"The amount of our day-to-day lives that's contained in these phones is just immeasurable," T. Scott Jones, a criminal defense attorney, said. "It literally controls just about everything we do."
Cell phone evidence presented in criminal trials can stretch far beyond calls and texts.
"They now show location, time, even number of steps that an individual may have taken," Don Bosch, a criminal defense attorney, said. "The phone data now can be so precise that it can literally put you on a specific corner by way of GPS positioning and tracking, depending on the settings on your phone."
That kind of evidence can make or break an alibi, as demonstrated in the Alex Murdaugh trial. People close to the prominent South Carolina attorney said they heard his voice in a cell phone video just minutes before his son and wife were murdered.
"That's just going to eliminate testimony with regards to 'I wasn't there' or 'I was somewhere else,' all of that," Jones said.
It also helped Knox County prosecutors convince a jury that Rashan Jordan, now 16, and Deondre Davis, 19, were guilty of first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated child abuse back in March in the 2021 murder of Stanley Freeman, Jr. The two were among the youngest defendants to be convicted of murder in Knox County in recent years.
They will be sentenced on Friday, June 23.
Investigators used circumstantial evidence to place the two teenagers at the scene of Freeman's murder.
Prosecutors introduced pictures of Freeman that were saved to Jordan's iCloud account in the days after he was killed, as well as photos of the murder weapons.
They also used data showing when their phones had connected to cars captured on camera near the murder.
"It's interesting, both from the juvenile perspective and from an exercise in showing how digital technology can aid or harm a case on either side," Bosch said. "You hardly can take a foot outside now without being caught on somebody's video surveillance, as well as your cell phone data... We have met the day of Big Brother, knowing kind of where we're at all the time."