OK, then, does telling the Apple Store that you lost your phone, when it was in fact impounded by police, constitute evidence destruction? I can see how it might.
I bet saying the magic words "my phone is impounded by the police, please wipe my phone" would be. But, assuming the suspect is telling the truth and assuming an apple employee disassociated the suspect's phone from their icloud account, let's also assume the suspect lied to the apple employee.
"I lost my phone and need a new one." "Your phone is lost? Let me disassociate your old and and help you set your new one up. What's your icloud username, email or phone number?"
Assuming the suspect knew disassociation meant data deletion on their old phone, is it up to the suspect to prevent this from happening? It seems pretty close to invoking the magic words I started out with, especially if this was the suspect's intent going into the store.
Now assuming the suspect didn't know, and he did not intent to delete data from his old phone... Now what? Is it acceptable to accidentally destroy evidence? Spoliation of evidence suggests a guilty conscience, but in this case it was an accident.
I didn’t downvote you, but I think you were downvoted because the post you were replying to was asking a legal/ethical question about whether it’s acceptable to accidentally destroy evidence in general, and you gave an unsupported answer and then veered off into a discussion of whether the law is applied to all people fairly.
In my view the question of whether the law is unbiased and “fair” is more important to resolve than whether accidentally erasing a phone seized by law enforcement counts as spoiling evidence.
There’s no point arguing that storing a vat of milk in the sun counts as the law enforcement impounding incorrectly or the suspect deliberately arranging evidence to destroy itself, when the crux of the matter is that the defendant is a black woman in Alabama so has no chance of a fair trial regardless how airtight the case might seem.
