Anyone have personal experience with offering a duplicate audiotape recording of a confession when the original has been accidentally lost?

Ortiz v. State, 651 SW2d 764 (CCA 1983), says the practice is OK, and TREs 1002-1004 have now formalized a process for the admissibility of secondary evidence like this, but the annotations are spotty and provide no real guidance on how to lay the predicate and offer this type of evidence.

If you have some good suggestions for a fellow prosecutor, please list them here. Thanks!

So long as the original was not deliberately destroyed and there is no evidence of tampering, there really isn't anything different to do for the predicate.

The Rules of Evidence treat copies as originals, absent such evidence.

Frankly, we rarely offer the original.

And, with digital, the duplication is identical, meaning no loss of quality.

Does that case discuss 38.22, Sec. 3(b) which talks about preservation of the recording? I think a copy counts as preservation--it does not say original.