Griffin v. State: Setting the Bar Too High for Authenticating Social Media Evidence

Brendan W. Hogan

In Griffin v. State, the Court of Appeals of Maryland found that a printout from a MySpace page, offered to demonstrate that a witness had been threatened into providing inaccurate testimony at an earlier trial, was not properly authenticated at trial because, despite the fact that the printout contained identifying characteristics the lower courts found sufficient for authentication, the risk of “manipulation ... by someone other than [the] purported creator and/or user” was too great to allow the printout into evidence. This holding improperly distinguished social media evidence from other forms of electronic evidence and suggested an artificially high authentication threshold for social media evidence presented at trial. The court further erred in creating a higher standard for authentication of social media evidence by stating a non-exclusive list of three means for authentication, because neither the plain text of the Maryland Rules of Evidence nor traditional authentication procedures support such a system. The court should have affirmed the lower court ruling that the evidence was admissible because the prosecution met its burden of proof and showed that the evidence was what it was purported to be; the defense offered no evidence to rebut this presumption.