Phone data errors may have played a role in ten thousand Danish cases
The Danish judiciary has decided to temporarily stop using telecommunications data as evidence for a conviction in criminal cases. This is related to previously discovered errors. There may now be more than 10,000 previous cases to be investigated.
The Danish Ministry of Justice writes that it has received new information from the national police showing that serious errors have been discovered in the use of telecommunications data in criminal criminal cases. On that basis, the Prosecutor General in Denmark has decided to temporarily suspend the use of these data as evidence for a conviction or as a basis for the arrest of suspects. According to the Danish Minister of Justice, Nick Hækkerup, new information about errors in this file has continuously emerged. He argues that this affects confidence in the justice system and therefore considers the measure justified and necessary.
This measure applies until October 18; in those two months, the errors are further investigated and it is looked at what caused them. A number of lawyers have been investigating this issue for some time; they examine the scope of the legal problem and try to come up with guidelines for handling cases that may have been affected by the errors.
According to the minister, this specifically concerns errors with regard to the conversion of the geographical coordinates, in order to arrive at the location of the radiated transmission tower. He states that this means that wrong mast locations may have been used in criminal criminal cases. Those locations are in turn used to determine the location of a telephone or at least to make that location plausible. The minister talks about various concrete errors in the raw data that the police have received from the telecom companies. The problem is said to be partly caused by the it systems of the police and partly by the systems of telecom providers. The minister says it is still unclear how serious the errors are and how big the consequences are.
The minister prescribes that the judiciary must now go through all current cases involving possible prison sentences. If telecommunications data plays a role in an ongoing case, the case may have to be restarted. In cases that have already received a verdict, the state must request the court to postpone the case so that the evidence can continue.
At an earlier stage, it was said that there were 10,700 cases between 2012 and March 2019, in which telecommunications data played a role, Finans writes, among others. However, that number could be even higher, because now things from before 2012 must also be included.
It is unclear how many cases were affected by errors in the location data of smartphones and thus led to different outcomes if no errors had been made. People may have to be released in the long run. Usually, someone is not only convicted on the basis of location data, but it serves as supporting evidence that can contribute to a final conviction.