Although not necessarily impartial, your smartphone is a great observer.
An Alabama man found this out the hard way this week when he was sentenced Monday to 16 years in prison for killing his wife. Although several factors led to Jeff West’s conviction in November on charges of manslaughter, AL.com, an Alabama news site, reports that data from his smartphone’s health app played a role.
West reportedly told police that he went to sleep at about 10:30 pm on the night of his wife’s death in 2018. However, according to data from his phone’s health app, he took 18 steps between 11:03 pm and 11:10 pm.
His late wife, Kat West, was 42 years old.
This is not the first time that data from a health tracker has been cited in a murder case. In the case of a death in 2016, police relied on the victim’s Apple Watch data to refute the allegations of the accused killer. In 2017, Fitbit’s data contradicted a man’s story about his wife’s death. Data from Apple’s health app was also used as evidence after a 2016 murder in Germany.
Notably, it was not just Jeff West’s phone data that seemed to contradict his claims. AL.com reports that Dr. Stephen Boudreau, a pathologist in the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences who testified at the trial, found that the blow to Kat West’s head was probably not caused by a fall. Instead, he noted that whatever struck the blow “had an advantage, but it was not sharp”.
A bottle of absinthe was found near Kat West’s body.
The tragic murder of Kat West and the subsequent conviction of Jeff West serve as a reminder that our technology is constantly working in the background – a fact that the police will not soon forget.
While this may have brought justice in the case of Kat West, it is easy to imagine similar data being used in an entirely different way. A man from Gainesville, Florida, Zachary McCoy, was investigated for theft simply because his phone location data put him close to a crime scene. (He was on an innocent bike ride.)
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“I didn’t realize that having location services on that Google also kept a record of where I was going,” McCoy told NBC News. “I’m sure it’s in your terms of service, but I never read through the text walls, and I think that most people don’t either. “
Law enforcement, however, is no doubt familiar with these terms of service – something to remember the next time you go to a peaceful protest.