We are beginning to receive lots of digital/video evidence on CD or DVD's from department stores, etc. How is everyone handling the discovery issue? (At least those offices that provide discovery to defense).

Are you simply burning a copy of the CD and letting them figure it out? Or trying to convert back to analog VHS so they don't whine and cry that they don't have the capability to view?

It's my understanding that equipment wise- it is a fairly cheap to convert these to regular VHS. Time wise, I'm not sure I know of an office with an extra person floating around to spend that amount of time on the conversion. If the department store cannot provide a copy (VHS) and you are maintaining an "open file" policy- you might just have to try to set the attorney up with a place to view the CD/DVD. I'm not sure of the format of what you are getting from the srores but viewing software is fairly flexible and the attorneys may not have a problem.
We haven't seen any of these (yet?)but I would like to get our tapes this way.

Todd

We should require everyone to use a Mac computer to view the evidence. That's all I have to say.

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas

John,
That's the 3rd or 4th reference I have seen from you about Macs---I guessI need to try them.

We have ordered a DV-Bridge and a computer with special "stuff" so that we can "supposedly" burn CD to CD or digital video on CD to VHS. This equipment also takes analog video tapes to high quality DV video.

It purports to do every type on backward/forward conversions. Hopefully we'll have it set-up in about 4-6 weeks.

Here's the counter-argument to John's Mac love affair, which appeared on Law.com and was provided (somewhat ironically) to me by John himself. To Lawyers Who Love Macs and WordPerfect: Get Over It

Hey, I was offering the article in the interest of keeping true to our oath to seek justice. But, hey, if you want to have super digital video and audio in the courtroom, you've got to adopt the Mac standard.

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas