Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats
Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats
“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible.”
“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,” he said, adding he would pursue these issues “on my own, outside of this trial.”
I was a bit confused how a Judge would just decide to start investigating some additional matter that is not formally before them to decide.
How do judges normally treat destruction of evidence? Do they not care who committed the crime and just make a ruling on how to infer it? I feel like the court would want to know who has committed something as serious as this but I'm not sure of the actual process for it.
In federal court, a judge has a few options to deal with spoliation;
Under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 37 possible sanctions are as follows:
- dismissal of the wrongdoer’s claim;
- entering judgment against the wrongdoer;
- exluding expert testimony; and
- application of adverse inference rule.
The last of these basically allows the court to infer (or instruct the jury to infer) that the destroyed evidence was the most possibly damning thing and hold that against the party in question.
Outside of the above, destruction of evidence is a crime. The judge has no power of investigation that I'm aware of, but maybe it just means informing those who have such power.
Like a republican Karen, he's going to talk to a manager.
"Do you know who I am??"
All bark, no bite on the hand that will feed him after he leaves the bench (Big Capital/Big Law). See:
"And yet, the judge decided today that he would not issue a “mandatory inference instruction” — one that would tell the jury they should proceed with the understanding that Google destroyed evidence that could have been detrimental to its case.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation.
Pichai, and many other employees, also testified they did not change the auto-delete setting even after they were made aware of their legal obligation to preserve evidence.
And Pichai, among other employees, admitted that they marked documents as legally privileged just to keep them out of other people’s hands.
On November 14th, Pichai told the court that he relied on his legal and compliance teams to instruct him properly, particularly Alphabet chief legal officer Kent Walker — and so Judge Donato hauled Walker into court two days later.
Today, Judge Donato said it was “deeply troubling to me as a judicial officer of the United States” that Google acted this way, calling it “the most serious and disturbing evidence I have ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence.”
And yet, the judge decided today that he would not issue a “mandatory inference instruction” — one that would tell the jury they should proceed with the understanding that Google destroyed evidence that could have been detrimental to its case.
The original article contains 595 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Disappointed this wasn't about GChat.
Getting rid of gchat was a crime.
Not keeping records of employees communications though? Honestly who gives a damn? Not everything needs to be saved.
Not everything normally needs to be saved. However, in this case it looks like the court ordered them to preserve data during discovery and they did not comply. From the article:
Pichai, and many other employees, also testified they did not change the auto-delete setting even after they were made aware of their legal obligation to preserve evidence.
Judges don't really investigate, they rely on evidence presented by the parties in a given case. I'm not aware of any mechanism for a judge just to 'go digging' like he seems to suggest he wants to do. I guess he could just be a dick in future cases? I.e. issuing ridiculous discovery orders.
Purged by creator
What a blowhard judge. The only bottom you're gonna get to is the moral bottom when you issue some milqtoast ruling that doesn't affect anything.
It does feel that way. If he actually believes what he's saying, he could have issued the order to the jury to treat all the evidence like it proves Google sucks.
But he didn't. I wonder if any Lemmy lawyers could explain why he might not have gone to that point when he's obviously upset about it.
IANAL
Usually judges don't issue such extreme orders only because of the fact that they don't want to be hammered on appeal.
Now this one is different. I have 2 theories: either the judge thinks the mandatory negative inference is not needed because there's a good chance the jury will do that anyway, or the judge is gonna advise the government to make this a separate case.
It honestly doesn't sound to me like he's just saying one thing and doing the other. He sounds rightly agitated and usually agitated judges will give you a low blow sooner or later if you fuck around.
He wanted to be in the media, not the crosshairs of billionaires that will kill him.