This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation.
Pichai, and many other employees, also testified they did not change the auto-delete setting even after they were made aware of their legal obligation to preserve evidence.
And Pichai, among other employees, admitted that they marked documents as legally privileged just to keep them out of other people’s hands.
On November 14th, Pichai told the court that he relied on his legal and compliance teams to instruct him properly, particularly Alphabet chief legal officer Kent Walker — and so Judge Donato hauled Walker into court two days later.
Today, Judge Donato said it was “deeply troubling to me as a judicial officer of the United States” that Google acted this way, calling it “the most serious and disturbing evidence I have ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence.”
And yet, the judge decided today that he would not issue a “mandatory inference instruction” — one that would tell the jury they should proceed with the understanding that Google destroyed evidence that could have been detrimental to its case.
The original article contains 595 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I was a bit confused how a Judge would just decide to start investigating some additional matter that is not formally before them to decide.
stifle867@programming.dev 11 months ago
How do judges normally treat destruction of evidence? Do they not care who committed the crime and just make a ruling on how to infer it? I feel like the court would want to know who has committed something as serious as this but I’m not sure of the actual process for it.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Don’t worry about it. He’ll totally deal with it after letting them off with a slap on the wrist, in his formal legal capacity… “in his own time” like some Hollywood renegade judge!
revv@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
In federal court, a judge has a few options to deal with spoliation;
The last of these basically allows the court to infer (or instruct the jury to infer) that the destroyed evidence was the most possibly damning thing and hold that against the party in question.
Outside of the above, destruction of evidence is a crime. The judge has no power of investigation that I’m aware of, but maybe it just means informing those who have such power.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Like a republican Karen, he’s going to talk to a manager.
andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun 11 months ago
“Do you know who I am??”
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
All bark, no bite on the hand that will feed him after he leaves the bench (Big Capital). See: