2w ago

If you were (falsely) accused of murder, but you have records of your phone at home with youtube videos being played, can you submit those records as a sort of Alibi to exonerate you?

I mean, we know they can be used as evidence against you, but what if I was actually just chilling and watching Youtube videos at home? Can my spying piece of shit phone ironically save me? 🤔

68 comments

I love this question.
The police would say, in my opinion, that the phone being somewhere was evidence if they needed it to be and say that it didn't prove the owner was there if they didn't want it to be useful.
- You are completely right, but I would hope the defense would submit it as evidence.
- Do you not understand the concept of a defence attorney? It's not just the police that decide what is and isn't evidence.
  
  Does the defense attorney go out to the scene, conduct interviews, photograph items of interest, or secure custody of any evidence gathered?
  It's the police that decide what is "evidence" and attorneys argue over what they found later. A good attorney might go out and look for some of those things after the fact, but the vast majority will not. You either gather your own evidence or roll the dice with the police actually doing their jobs.
- To make matters more complex, if I were to murder someone I would leave me phone at home, maybe leave it playing videos. It would be much less likely that my phone is randomly at the house of someone who was just murdered if I am truly innocent. That alone does not prove me guilty, of course, but it sure doesn't look good.

You don’t need an alibi. You don’t need to provide evidence. You are presumed innocent. The cops need to prove you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Unless you’re in the US, then you’re fucked.
- Had me in the first half

if you have that, there’s probably location data and signin/unlock events that would tell a more compelling story. Especially if you use biometric unlock.

I'd say not only the videos, but also the rest of your browsing history, and comment history, etc. If you can prove with a timeline that what you were doing was in line with the rest of your behavior that week, it'd be some strong evidence in your favor.
- I don't need a jury of my peers judging my comment history. I'll just take the guilty plea, thank you.
  
  I hope you feel really ashamed of this comment! And all your other comments kind stranger!

It wouldn't exonerate you, unless you could prove beyond a doubt that it was you using the phone. It'd be easy, if you were planning a murder, to give an accomplice your phone and have them use it all night to cover for you. It might be able to be used in conjunction with other evidence, though, to assist in your defense.
- Wrong, that's the opposite of how reasonable doubt works. It is the prosecutor's job to prove beyond doubt that the defendent is guilty of the charges. The defendent does not need to prove they are innocent.
  If the prosecutor can't prove that the defendent is lying about the alibi, then they've failed at their job.
  
  That's how it's supposed to work but rarely actually does.
  
  It's like saying you couldn't have committed a crime because your TV was on at the time; it seems too flimsy to even be usable if you didn't have some other form of evidence supporting that it was actually you using it to go along with it. I'm not a lawyer, so it's possible I'm totally wrong, but surely no competent lawyer would expect that to work and no judge would take that as evidence on its own merits.
  
  Are you sure? Sounds like how it used to be, you know, before people were taken off the streets by masked men.
- It's more that it's evidence that a reasonable person could doubt. It's the prosecutors job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense needs to convince a reasonable person that you might not have done it.
  If there's other evidence phone location and activity data could be argued to be faked, but in isolation a reasonable person could doubt that someone faked their phone activity and location.
  The court isn't interested in exonerating people, it's only interested in arguments supporting guilt and finding holes in them. It's why they don't find you innocent, only "not guilty". You don't argue that you're innocent, you argue that the reason they say you're guilty is full of holes.

Twist: The videos were all about how to get away with murder.

It is a piece of evidence. The jury would decide how much weight to put on that evidence. Depending on other factors, the jury could decide it is compelling and provides reasonable doubt, or, they could decide it is not compelling and disregard it and look at all the other evidence regardless of this particular bit.
Edit to add: Prior to trial there is a jury of one, the prosecutor. There is a chance that the prosecutor will find that evidence compelling and not even bring charges, or dismiss them if they were already brought.

A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone's location could be ascertained.
But that still doesn't say anything about where you are, since not everyone -- even in 2025 -- carries their phone every time they leave home.
But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.
And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.
Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

I remember a streamer faked a stream to murder his girlfriend/ex-wife. His alibi did not work.
- https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/youtuber-reportedly-faked-gta-livestream-to-have-an-alibi-while-he-committed-murder-2052974/
  McCullagh eventually admitted to authorities that the live stream was not recorded on the night of McNally’s death. McCullagh also allegedly left his phone in McNally’s house after her murder.
  Dude got scared in the interrogation and fessed up. Lmfao, if you can't withstand being berated in a police interrogation, maybe don't do a murder. Also, leaving your phone in a crime scene is like the nail in the coffin.
  
  Don't, like, bring your phone while doing crime
  
  Yeah, I think the phone is what sunk him.

Well no, because all those phone records show is that someone was using your phone at your house during x times to watch videos. There is no verification that it's actually you. Now, if we actually had face tracking technology to see whether or not you're actually watching ads, that could change. But as for right now, no.
- Crimes are (ostensibly) supposed to be proven beyond doubt, so yes, it can be (and often is, I work for a telecom) used evidence, for both prosecution and defence.
- It would absolutely be used as evidence in your favour by your defence though. It's not conclusive, but it helps.
- But you can provide more than one day's worth of evidence and check how likely that day's activity fall within your normal viewing habits.
  
  within your normal viewing habits
  Im now scared of having to show just mountains of specific soft core fetish porn to a whole room of people and be like "yep. Nightly mate."

Depends on how bad the cops want to pin it on you.
If they're on your ass hard, they'll ignore exculpatory evidence. Since only YouTube playing isn't concrete enough to guarantee much of anything about where you were, it's definitely not going to satisfy them without more.
Even the phone itself being in you home the entire time isn't definitive proof you were there.
There's not even a guarantee you could establish reasonable doubt with every record of your phone being available, so you can't pin your hopes on a jury either.
Hell, you could be on a call from a landline, and that isn't sure fire proof you were at home. It's better than a cell call, but there's ways to fake being at home over landline if someone is determined enough.
It isn't impossible though. You get the right investigators, they verify that your device was at home, and everything else is consistent with you being there, you could get bumped way down the list for their focus. Mind you, if every other possible suspect is then cleared, they'll come back to you.
- The police have nothing to do with it. They aren't used to obtain records, that's done through the legal system like court orders
  
  You do know that the cops are the ones that do the legwork, right? That most prosecutors rely on them to provide cause to get warrants in the first place. If the cops keep putting the same person forward as their target, that's who a DA will try to get warrants for, not some other random asshole.
  If you can't convince the cops of your alibi, then chances are good that they'll keep plodding along at it, regardless of them being right or wrong.
  So, yeah, the cops have something to do with it
  
  police have nothing to do with it.
  Dreamer.

The prosecution lawyer is going to argue that evidence could have been faked. Then it comes down to how convincing the jury find that argument. Personally I'd say that you could have been using a VPN to make it appear that you were accessing Youtube from home or that you left your phone at home and just left Youtube auto playing or ran some sort of automation to search for and play videos.
- If you can get logs that show the unlock time and format it was unlocked with. Say fingerprint, and the GPS location/satellites the packets were going through you could theoretically prove you were within that area with the phone. In practice though... Dont know if you could get the location data supenod from the ISP. So it's probably be on you to acquire the location data using something like googles location data. You can generally check it by going to Google maps, click your icon and choose timeline:
  
  You can tell it to delete that data and set the retention period. Otherwise it will keep it for years if I remember correctly, I reduced mine to a couple weeks.
- ran some sort of automation
  I clicked this post thinking just this. Also I didn't read the "falsely". I was curious if that's good enough alibi for a real murder. (No murder intended)

It could certainly be used as evidence in your favor. Whether it by itself would be enough to exonerate you would depend on things like the evidence against you and how much weight the jury gave to your records.

Currently having a dozen eye witnesses does not count as an alibi these days.
Heck, the evidence being broadcast on national television doesn’t count (see recent political arrests)
- Tangent: eye witness testimony is the worst kind of testimony.
  
  Soon it might actually become the lesser evil, considering the possibility of deepfakes.
  Evidence trustworthiness would be like (from least to most trustworthy):
  Photo/Audio Evidence
  Video Evidence
  Eyewitness testimony
  Eyewitness testimony + the witness was also also recording it at the time

What you really need is to live in a country with super aggressive CCTV. Then proof is literally around every corner

Again Dennis? Who was it this time?

There's nothing to prove that you were home with your phone.

You'd have to prove it was not only you watching them, but that they were watched somewhere other than the crime scene. I mean, it's entirely possible to run YouTube on your phone while you're killing someone. Or be running YouTube at your home while you're not there.

Here's what I think, though IANAL:
Your phone being somewhere unusual is pretty good evidence you were there, especially if a crime happened there. What are the odds you gave your phone to someone to go commit a crime with it on them?
However, if you're planning on committing a crime, it wouldn't be that difficult to have it play videos while you're out doing said crime. It's evidence that something happened, but it isn't very strong evidence that you didn't commit the crime.
However, a criminal trial requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. You don't need to prove that you're innocent. You just need to create enough doubt that you're guilty. It's the prosecution that has to prove that you're guilty.
- I'll point out that just having videos play without interacting with the site would get undermined pretty easily. But if you were actively tapping around and deliberately interacting with the site, you'd have a stronger case that you were actually at home.
  
  Sure, but I don't know how they'd get that data. Every tap likely isn't stored. Still, I could write a script to fake it, and build a device to to it. It's evidence, but it isn't particularly strong.

Not unless you can prove that it was you that was watching those videos, no.

Tape the phone to your cat or something so the tumbler is seeing some action. Otherwise it's just a phone laying on a surface playing videos.
- Pre-record the live stream, brb chat, gonna do an assassination. /s

68 comments