The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Can e-mail be incriminating evidence in court of law?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 12, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Can e-mail be incriminating evidence in court of law?

Can an email become incriminating evidence in court of law?

In both the earlier mentioned cases as also several other cases in recent past, the evidence for prosecutors in a court of law has always been e-mails.

The question though is whether an e-mail can be used as incriminating evidence just as any physical record.

According to Captain Raghu Raman, CEO of Mahindra Special Security Group, a company offering enterprise derisking solutions, the most important aspect in providing e-mail as evidence lay in maintaining a `chain of custody.'

"The prosecutors will have to prove that their evidence, right from the point of origin to being presented in the court, has not been tampered with." N.Vijayashankar, director of Cyber Law College, says it is important to retain such contentious e-mails in the recipient's email inbox.

"The complainants must not delete the mail thinking they can download it and save them on hard disk or floppy disk. The mail would lose its validity then," he says. Investigators can determine the I.P. (Internet Protocol) address from which the email had originated and use that as evidence.

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