e-Lessons Learned

Law school is an exciting (albeit stressful) time for a lot of individuals.  One of the first things you notice is that you will be learning all these new legal concepts that you think you’ll be able to apply in you daily life.  You sign a lease – and you think of Contracts and Property classes.  You see a car accident happen – and you think of Torts.  You see an opportunity to create an evidence to substantiate a false claim against a company – and you think of Civil Procedure and Evidence. Wait, come again?

Apparently, that’s last one is what one student at Chicago-Kent Law School thought while she was enrolled there.  In United States v. Jackson, a law school student engaged in a series of actions where she sought to swindle United Parcel Service (UPS) out of more than a half million dollars through a bogus claim that UPS failed to deliver her packages and that “racial elements” in UPS were responsible for defacing her packages.

While she was drawing up her fraudulent scheme, the defendant engaged in a wide-ranging course of conduct intended to create an evidentiary trail to incriminate UPS.  As far as is relevant here, she conducted research on her own computer using another individual’s Lexis-Nexis account information.  More specifically, she conducted a search on federal cases and statutes with the words “united,” “parcel,” “service,” “damaged,” and “packages” in the same paragraph.  If that wasn’t enough to show her fraudulent intent, she also conducted Internet searches for “white supremacy” organizations, visited the websites of two such organizations, and created false email correspondence.

Once she filed her $572,000 claim against UPS, the company began investigating the situation itself.  Eventually, and not surprisingly, the Chicago Police quickly became involved.  During the course of its investigation, the prosecutor’s office eventually found all the electronic evidence that the defendant had fabricated and created on her computer.  The defendant was eventually convicted of mail and wire fraud and obstruction of justice, due in large part to the electronic evidence used against her.

So what’s the lesson here? The obvious one is that people shouldn’t try to defraud a company for a quick payday, while in the process creating electronic records that will be found by the prosecutor’s office. But we all already knew that crime is bad.  The more important lesson is this: In prosecuting individuals for mail and wire fraud, the smoking gun may be hidden inside the computer. If they are not already (and one can surmise that they likely are), prosecutors should search through electronic records previously under the defendant’s control when seeking incriminating evidence. Given the frequency with which people (especially young people) use the Internet, it is not surprising that key evidence can be found in computer records.

And for all you law school students out there thinking of alternative career options, “career criminal” should not be one of them.

Tim Cedrone has since graduated from Seton Hall Law School.

Article posted on September 19, 2009 at 12:42 AM |              More... 
Tagged as: Accessibility, Discoverability, Procedure.
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