Matter of M.S. (M.H.)

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

Investigator Mahoney’s testimony that the videos matched his personal observations of the layout of the living room and items he observed there are similarly insufficient and are not meaningfully different from what we rejected in Patterson. There, an officer who had visited the store where the robbery occurred testified that the video was an accurate depiction of the store’s “actual physical layout” (Patterson, 242 AD2d at 741). The fact that much of the video apparently accurately depicted the home is not sufficient—as it was not in Patterson—to authenticate the video. If such testimony was insufficient then, the increasing prevalence of “deepfake” videos has only rendered the method of matching circumstantial details in a video to personal observations a more suspect form of authentication; most fabricated videos “leverage” real details from real photos and videos of real places and people, then alter the pieces the person wishes to alter to create a realistic, but manipulated, video (see Amicus Br. of Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences at 7-8). In the authentication context, what matters most is whether the events depicted are as real as the proponent claims them to be, not whether there are some identifying features of the video that can be corroborated in real life.

Authorities cited in the passage: People v. Patterson, 93 N.Y.2d 80 (1999) · Amicus Brief of Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences