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Reclassification of alleged IIOCs

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All Over the Place

Member since
March 2021

30 posts

Posted Sun May 30, 2021 4:21pmReport post

Hi, everyone.

After a search of various devices, the police found c. 40 IIOCs on four or five devices on my partner's devices - this spanned a 20 year period.

One thing that stood out for me, though, was when they listed the alleged IIOCs, the police said that these had been subjectively assessed. I have heard of cases where alleged IIOCs were independently assessed and the independent assessor would say that they weren't in fact IIOCs.

So my question is, is anyone aware, through their own personal experience, of alleged IIOCs being independently assessed and had them successfully reclassified as not being IIOCs?

Many thanks.

Edited Mon May 31, 2021 12:53pm

Mindful

Member since
January 2021

50 posts

Posted Mon May 31, 2021 8:45amReport post

Hi

If you scroll through the posts theres a post a while back where some people had got independent forensics.

Zack

Member since
July 2019

74 posts

Posted Mon May 31, 2021 1:45pmReport post

In my partners case, the devices were put through some sort of process were
they compare the content to the CAID database. I got the impression that was
what normally happened, and it's usually images already identified. As for
images not on their database, I'm not sure. It's something your partner should
discuss with his solicitor.

If I remember correctly, several police forces classify the same
image, and they get considered to be illegal and added to the CAID system if
there is at least something like 80% of agreement (in terms of age of the
person, and whether or not it is indecent). I would have thought it was have to
be 100% agreement, to pass the reasonable doubt test. But everything I thought
I knew about our CJS was shattered. In my partners case they just gave a few
text descriptions of images from each category, threw in with some ambiguous
language, and contradictory statements. It's all a bit cloak and dagger.

I've certainly read about cases where the prosecution has discontinued their
case, when the evidence was challenged. But I don't know how frequent that is.
Given that they often use the same evidence in multiple cases, it would be
interesting to see if they relook at similiar cases to see if a mistake has
been made. I susepct they don't bother, even though a real justice system shoudl require it.

I found this interesting:

https://www.bsblaw.co.uk/indecent-images

They note: "We estimate that up to 40% of the images in the police
database have been incorrectly categorised. In some cases, the models that
feature in certain “barely legal” sites have been proved to be above the legal
age based on information in the USC Title Database."

If the above is true, you do wonder how poor of an investigation it must
have been if the prosecution did not discover that "victim" was not a
child but an actual known adult porn star. That really should not be possible.

Some other cases that were thrown out are mentioned here:

https://evidence-matters.com/about-us/recent-results/

After what I saw with my partners case, I don't have much faith on the
proportionality and honesty of the prosecution in these type of cases. But I
only have knowledge of one case, so perhaps that is unfair.