Defence lawyers in the ongoing Kyle Rittenhouse court case have sought a mistrial, complaining that video evidence sent to them by the prosecution was compressed by the Mail app on a prosecutor’s iPhone and therefore wasn’t as clear as the material used by the state.
It appears there were technical difficulties at this stage of proceedings. According to CNN‘s coverage of the trial, a member of the prosecution team tried to use AirDrop to send the relevant drone video footage to the defence; when this failed, because the recipient was using an Android device, they instead emailed the file from the same iPhone, during which process it was allegedly compressed from 11.2MB to 3.6MB.
“The video provided to the defence was not as clear as the video kept by the state,” reads part of a defence motion subsequently filed to dismiss the case.
2/2 2/2 -Defense alleges State gave them drone video that was not as high quality as the copy the state had. Read full motion attached to this thread. #KyleRittenhouse pic.twitter.com/QCLnNfKKXw
— Kristen Barbaresi (@KristenBarbar) November 17, 2021
But the prosecution claim that any such compression was inadvertent, and deny that they can be held responsible for “something that happened in the transfer that we had no knowledge of”.
The judge has not yet ruled on the motion.
Bizarrely, this isn’t the first Apple-related tech confusion to afflict the trial. The judge in the case previously disallowed the use of an iPad to present video evidence in court, on the basis of an apparent misunderstanding of pinch-to-zoom.
Rittenhouse faces five felony charges, including two counts of homicide and one of attempted homicide, related to shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. If convicted on the most serious counts he could face life in prison.
Author: David Price, Editor
David has loved the iPhone since covering the original 2007 launch; later his obsession expanded to include iPad and Apple Watch. He offers advice to owners (and prospective owners) of these devices.