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  • Introducing evidence

    I need to introduce facebook messages as evidence on a Motion.

    Can I type the conversation out and swear that it is a true copy of the entire conversation? If not, how do I go about introducing a conversation as evidence.

    Help in this matter would be most appreciated!

  • #2
    I'm not a lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice. Just speaking from personal experience. When I wanted to do something similar I print screened the message and pasted it into word. I was then able to print it. I mentioned the conversation as exhibit a in my affadavit. I made a cover page for the exhibit. It said something like this is exhibit a mentioned in the affadavit of my name sworn on this date and then there was a signature line. When I swore the affadavit I also swore and signed the exhibit. I can't tell you if that's correct but no one ever came back and told me it was incorrect.

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    • #3
      Your first step would be (assuming Ontario Family Law) would be to file and serve a form 22 (I think it's 22!) Request to admit. Hopefully, you can gain acceptance of evidence this way - should the other side refuse, you'll have to look into other means.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by bringeron View Post
        I need to introduce facebook messages as evidence on a Motion.

        Can I type the conversation out and swear that it is a true copy of the entire conversation? If not, how do I go about introducing a conversation as evidence.

        Help in this matter would be most appreciated!
        You could, but consider the source... (assuming you are a Judge)
        How does it look? It looks like someone trying to build evidence to support their 'story'. Not to say you're lying, but an un-biased opinion may carry more weight.

        I think you would be better served to present this kind of information through testimony rather than through affidavit. As an unbiased observer, it would seem (to me at least) as less self serving.
        Last edited by wretchedotis; 02-04-2014, 10:48 PM.

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        • #5
          how about SMS? i.e. text messages? how are they introduced?

          I just qouted the entire SMSes in the affidavit and intend to take the phone with me if the judge wants to look at it.

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          • #6
            I took photos of SMS messages and submitted them. They proved to be quite damaging for my ex (i.e threats to pursue sole custody) I gather that their authenticity could have been challenged, but in my case my ex did not challenge.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by nogoingback View Post
              I took photos of SMS messages and submitted them. They proved to be quite damaging for my ex (i.e threats to pursue sole custody) I gather that their authenticity could have been challenged, but in my case my ex did not challenge.
              photos i.e. screen shots? or photos with an actual camera?

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              • #8
                For sms - you have a few options, that vary in providing different "strengths" to the evidence.

                The easiest, is to type up a transcript, including sending and receiving phone numbers, dates and times, and a precisely replicated transcript of the conversation. Accompany this with a sworn affidavit attesting to the authenticity of this transcript being a true representation of the sms conversation between you and the other party. This is also, perhaps the weakest form of submitting this type of evidence. The other party can easily deny that the texts were ever sent.

                You can bolster the above transcript with screen shots of those texts. This may be somewhat more effective in convincing the other party to accept the transcript into evidence. Beware though - there are many apps out there that help unscrupulous people "fake" text screen shots. Your ex could easily claim that you "faked" the screen shots, and provide links to such apps to support their position in this matter.

                One of the strongest ways you could establish with greater certainty the existence of text conversations - is to have a computer forensics company download all your texts for you and create a report. This will cost some money - but they can retrieve the phone numbers, dates, times, and content of messages off your phone *** AND provide reliable third party evidence verifying your above mentioned transcript***

                You need to carefully assess the relevance of these texts and weigh the strength they bring to your case, versus the cost of obtaining this evidence.

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                • #9
                  In my case I took photos with a DSLR camera of my cell phones sms messages

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                  • #10
                    Think carefully if you really need these. In many instances you don't. I have found that many parties to a case tend to get off track in their evidence. In my husband's situation we received Requests to Admit that had things like:

                    The child does not wear underwear to school.
                    The child wears his father's socks.
                    Your wife does not like that you pay spousal support.
                    You like 16 year old girls.
                    You cheated on your wife while married during the summer of 2010 on multiple occasions.

                    I bring these to light because some are irrelevant (no fault divorce makes cheating irrelevant) and a lot of the other statements are not only subjective but just silly (define "liking" 16 year old girls) and then try to answer a compound sentence such as the last one... it was clear she was doing her own paperwork and lawyer wasn't paying attention to it.

                    And we did take pictures of text messages from mom to the child and from mom to us, emails too, and she denied many of them. She denied a whole lot of information that was not really deniable. Now we settled before full trial (or we thought we did anyways - she continues to be the same pain in the @$$ as before lol).

                    What we did do though is ask very specific statements in our requests to admit and after receiving the response from her, we then sent the emails, text messages, etc. to her that contained these statements as in some cases she admitted to one and not the other. We also did this with medical information on the children (information she provided and wrote to a medical practitioner) and she denied the statements (she didn't know we had her notes obviously) and then she admitted to the authenticity of the documents.

                    We were trying to establish how she was not a credible witness given she only admitted anything when it was black and white in front of her. And in many instances she denied very common facts - like who she was in a relationship with and if the lived with someone. Not so important who she lived with, but it was important that she never had her story straight.

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