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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Police digital forensic services have been backlogged even before the explosion of AI, given the preponderance of surveillance video, Ring camera footage, phone extractions, social media posts and other digital evidence involved in court cases, notes Toronto defence lawyer Chris Sewrattan. This means that someone charged with a criminal offence who wishes to challenge the authenticity of digital evidence before trial essentially has to prove its inauthenticity themselves. “This requires hiring a private digital forensics firm and having them draft a report … This process is both time-intensive and expensive for the client.”
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The Ontario Court of Appeal warned about the dangers of accepting digital evidence at face value back in 2021. The province’s highest court allowed an appeal because a trial judge failed to conduct a proper voir dire on the authenticity of electronic messages. “This case demonstrates the risks associated with not paying adequate heed to the dangers that are associated with relying on text and other messages, absent expert evidence,” Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote in the decision. “Trial judges need to be rigorous in their evaluation of such evidence, when it is presented, both in terms of its reliability and its probative value.But there are practical realities."
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STORY: "An Ontario man was jailed for eight months over faked Facebook messages from his ex-wife. Why courts are struggling to spot easy fakes," by Courts Reporter Betsy Powell, published by The Toronto Star, on August 4, 2026. (Betsy Powell is a reporter with the crime, courts and justice team at the Star. She is the author of Bad Seeds: the True Story of Toronto’s Galloway Boys Street Gang.)
SUB-HEADING: “I don’t think the bar and the courts are ready for a new reality in which we can no longer believe our own eyes.”
GIST: "In November 2023, a judge ordered a Vaughan man to be detained after his ex-wife alleged he’d sent her threatening emails and Facebook messages.
“These allegations are frightening. The defendant has allegedly said that he will kill his former spouse and her children,” the Brampton jurist wrote.
From the outset, the man urged officers to investigate whether his former spouse had fabricated the messages to get him into trouble amid their acrimonious litigation.
“I definitely did not send anything like this,” he told a Peel Regional Police officer in a recorded statement shortly after his arrest. “I have proof, and witnesses for every word I am saying.”
But police and the Crown didn’t look into his claims. Not right away.
Instead, the man spent the next eight months locked up in one of Ontario’s most notorious jails, and more than a year after that living under strict bail conditions as his lawyer, Jonathan Weingarten, pushed police and prosecutors to investigate the source of the messages.
They did, finally, earlier this year and determined the messages indeed originated from accounts linked to the ex-wife’s phone number. On the eve of the jury trial in June, all the charges against him were withdrawn.
Investigators had years to look into this, Weingarten said, but “the Crown and police did nothing.”
Speaking to the Star, Toronto-area defence lawyers say the Vaughan man’s story is not an outlier; the court is seeing more and more cases where digital evidence that appears at first glance to be incriminating turns out to be unreliable or even manipulated.
takes us into the world of dee
The rise of deepfakes, AI-photo manipulation and other new technologies is “going to shake us out of our complacency,” Toronto defence lawyer Matthew Gourlay wrote in an email.
“The days of Crowns just putting in screenshots submitted by complainants and witnesses are probably coming to an end,” he wrote. “I don’t think the bar and the courts are ready for a new reality in which we can no longer believe our own eyes.”
Why the onus of proving a fake often falls on the defence
The Ontario Court of Appeal warned about the dangers of accepting digital evidence at face value back in 2021. The province’s highest court allowed an appeal because a trial judge failed to conduct a proper voir dire on the authenticity of electronic messages.
“This case demonstrates the risks associated with not paying adequate heed to the dangers that are associated with relying on text and other messages, absent expert evidence,” Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote in the decision. “Trial judges need to be rigorous in their evaluation of such evidence, when it is presented, both in terms of its reliability and its probative value.
But there are practical realities.
Police digital forensic services have been backlogged even before the explosion of AI, given the preponderance of surveillance video, Ring camera footage, phone extractions, social media posts and other digital evidence involved in court cases, notes Toronto defence lawyer Chris Sewrattan. This means that someone charged with a criminal offence who wishes to challenge the authenticity of digital evidence before trial essentially has to prove its inauthenticity themselves.
“This requires hiring a private digital forensics firm and having them draft a report … This process is both time-intensive and expensive for the client.”
He has an example.
A woman claimed to have photographed Sewrattan’s client committing an indecent act outside her child’s elementary school in York Region. But a digital‑forensics review showed the images didn’t reliably depict him — and likely weren’t authentic. The charges were ultimately withdrawn.
“My client was a wonderful grandfather who was doing nothing wrong and was disgusted at the charges,” Sewrattan said.
Eight months in Maplehurst
So how to address this new reality?
Weingarten believes it starts with accountability.
Prosecutors don’t have to explain their reasons for dropping a case. The Brampton prosecutor nonetheless explained in an email to Weingarten that his client’s charges would be stayed over “credibility concerns” with the complainant.
For Weingarten, that’s not enough. His client spent eight months locked up in Maplehurst jail. That time included the height of the jail’s prisoner-abuse scandal, when guards carried out a “vengeful” collective punishment of nearly 200 inmates in December 2023 after an inmate punched a guard.
STAR INVESTIGATION
Maplehurst guards told him to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ during jailhouse beating. How the inmate abuse scandal continues to upend the courts
He also lost his job, blew through his savings, and, after his release and living under house arrest, developed psychological and various medical conditions, said Weingarten.
If nothing happens to the investigators and prosecutors who ignore repeated requests from a defendant to test the veracity of digital evidence, he wonders, then “why should they care?” The Crown does not conduct criminal investigations or obtain relevant evidence independent of the police investigation. However, Weingarten argues they are required to advise police if they receive relevant information from an accused person through their counsel.
He wants Peel police to charge his client’s ex-wife for duping the system. (Peel police did not respond to a request for comment on the case.)
The Star is not naming the warring ex-spouses as the man’s charges were stayed.
Asked by the Star in an email if she sent the threatening messages that resulted in her ex-husband’s incarceration, the ex-wife responded: “The case is closed and I don’t care.”
In an email, Peel Regional Police said the matter is currently under review. “As the review and related investigation remain ongoing, no further information will be provided at this time.”
‘We are going to have to be much more careful’
The new reality places heavy onus on judges to ensure a fair trial, especially when a self-represented accused disputes the authenticity of digital evidence, notes Gourlay.
He is co-author of a new edition of an evidence textbook that includes a “significant” update to the chapter on digital evidence. He included a quote by Justice Brock Jones, one of the book’s authors, who noted the vast majority of self-represented accused will lack the means to retain an expert of their own.
Police and prosecutors also have their work cut out for them, Gourlay believes.
While the potential has existed ever since electronic evidence of various kinds — text messages, emails, social media posts and digital video — became a regular part of trials, it’s rare for the spectre of fabrication to become an issue in court.
“Lawyers have often just put in screenshots of electronic content, without any meaningful forensic authentication,” Gourlay wrote.
“The law imposes a relatively low bar for authenticating electronic evidence, and again in most cases there’s no realistic dispute that the evidence is real.”
As the reliability of photos and videos becomes increasingly uncertain in the age of easy digital manipulation, the justice system is losing one of its most trusted forms of objective corroboration — a reliable check on the fallibility of human memory.
“That logic breaks down when there’s a realistic possibility the images themselves have been fabricated,” he continues.
“In this new reality, a witness’s credibility must be assessed before their photo or video can be trusted, reversing the traditional evidentiary hierarchy and introducing a layer of subjectivity into what used to be considered hard, corroborating evidence.”
“In this new digital age, however, there may be times where a bail court needs to dig through the weeds to find the just result,” he said.
Weingarten, who also practises family law, said Peel police’s refusal to investigate his client’s claims reflects the unintended consequences of Ontario’s mandatory‑charging policy, introduced in 1994 to govern police response to domestic‑violence complaints.
But the dangers run in both directions. Ontario courts have repeatedly confronted horrifying cases in which men released on bail for earlier assaults or threats against partners later killed them.
Just this month, Toronto police charged two men with murdering intimate partners after each had previously been arrested — and released — for allegedly committing violence against them.
And there is a valid concern that the constant threat of fake evidence will produce false alarms, “where we wrongly reject genuine evidence out of an excess of skepticism,” Gourlay wrote.
Police departments and Crown offices are going to need to start devoting significant resources to “digital quality control,” he continued.
But neither should defence counsel be complacent, either by assuming that police will willingly shoulder this burden or by assuming they will do it reliably.
“We are going to have to be much more careful.""
GIST: "In November 2023, a judge ordered a Vaughan man to be detained after his ex-wife alleged he’d sent her threatening emails and Facebook messages.
“These allegations are frightening. The defendant has allegedly said that he will kill his former spouse and her children,” the Brampton jurist wrote.
From the outset, the man urged officers to investigate whether his former spouse had fabricated the messages to get him into trouble amid their acrimonious litigation.
“I definitely did not send anything like this,” he told a Peel Regional Police officer in a recorded statement shortly after his arrest. “I have proof, and witnesses for every word I am saying.”
But police and the Crown didn’t look into his claims. Not right away.
Instead, the man spent the next eight months locked up in one of Ontario’s most notorious jails, and more than a year after that living under strict bail conditions as his lawyer, Jonathan Weingarten, pushed police and prosecutors to investigate the source of the messages.
They did, finally, earlier this year and determined the messages indeed originated from accounts linked to the ex-wife’s phone number. On the eve of the jury trial in June, all the charges against him were withdrawn.
Investigators had years to look into this, Weingarten said, but “the Crown and police did nothing.”
Speaking to the Star, Toronto-area defence lawyers say the Vaughan man’s story is not an outlier; the court is seeing more and more cases where digital evidence that appears at first glance to be incriminating turns out to be unreliable or even manipulated.
takes us into the world of dee
The rise of deepfakes, AI-photo manipulation and other new technologies is “going to shake us out of our complacency,” Toronto defence lawyer Matthew Gourlay wrote in an email.
“The days of Crowns just putting in screenshots submitted by complainants and witnesses are probably coming to an end,” he wrote. “I don’t think the bar and the courts are ready for a new reality in which we can no longer believe our own eyes.”
Why the onus of proving a fake often falls on the defence
The Ontario Court of Appeal warned about the dangers of accepting digital evidence at face value back in 2021. The province’s highest court allowed an appeal because a trial judge failed to conduct a proper voir dire on the authenticity of electronic messages.
“This case demonstrates the risks associated with not paying adequate heed to the dangers that are associated with relying on text and other messages, absent expert evidence,” Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote in the decision. “Trial judges need to be rigorous in their evaluation of such evidence, when it is presented, both in terms of its reliability and its probative value.
But there are practical realities.
Police digital forensic services have been backlogged even before the explosion of AI, given the preponderance of surveillance video, Ring camera footage, phone extractions, social media posts and other digital evidence involved in court cases, notes Toronto defence lawyer Chris Sewrattan. This means that someone charged with a criminal offence who wishes to challenge the authenticity of digital evidence before trial essentially has to prove its inauthenticity themselves.
“This requires hiring a private digital forensics firm and having them draft a report … This process is both time-intensive and expensive for the client.”
He has an example.
A woman claimed to have photographed Sewrattan’s client committing an indecent act outside her child’s elementary school in York Region. But a digital‑forensics review showed the images didn’t reliably depict him — and likely weren’t authentic. The charges were ultimately withdrawn.
“My client was a wonderful grandfather who was doing nothing wrong and was disgusted at the charges,” Sewrattan said.
Eight months in Maplehurst
So how to address this new reality?
Weingarten believes it starts with accountability.
Prosecutors don’t have to explain their reasons for dropping a case. The Brampton prosecutor nonetheless explained in an email to Weingarten that his client’s charges would be stayed over “credibility concerns” with the complainant.
For Weingarten, that’s not enough. His client spent eight months locked up in Maplehurst jail. That time included the height of the jail’s prisoner-abuse scandal, when guards carried out a “vengeful” collective punishment of nearly 200 inmates in December 2023 after an inmate punched a guard.
STAR INVESTIGATION
Maplehurst guards told him to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ during jailhouse beating. How the inmate abuse scandal continues to upend the courts
He also lost his job, blew through his savings, and, after his release and living under house arrest, developed psychological and various medical conditions, said Weingarten.
If nothing happens to the investigators and prosecutors who ignore repeated requests from a defendant to test the veracity of digital evidence, he wonders, then “why should they care?” The Crown does not conduct criminal investigations or obtain relevant evidence independent of the police investigation. However, Weingarten argues they are required to advise police if they receive relevant information from an accused person through their counsel.
He wants Peel police to charge his client’s ex-wife for duping the system. (Peel police did not respond to a request for comment on the case.)
The Star is not naming the warring ex-spouses as the man’s charges were stayed.
Asked by the Star in an email if she sent the threatening messages that resulted in her ex-husband’s incarceration, the ex-wife responded: “The case is closed and I don’t care.”
In an email, Peel Regional Police said the matter is currently under review. “As the review and related investigation remain ongoing, no further information will be provided at this time.”
‘We are going to have to be much more careful’
The new reality places heavy onus on judges to ensure a fair trial, especially when a self-represented accused disputes the authenticity of digital evidence, notes Gourlay.
He is co-author of a new edition of an evidence textbook that includes a “significant” update to the chapter on digital evidence. He included a quote by Justice Brock Jones, one of the book’s authors, who noted the vast majority of self-represented accused will lack the means to retain an expert of their own.
Police and prosecutors also have their work cut out for them, Gourlay believes.
While the potential has existed ever since electronic evidence of various kinds — text messages, emails, social media posts and digital video — became a regular part of trials, it’s rare for the spectre of fabrication to become an issue in court.
“Lawyers have often just put in screenshots of electronic content, without any meaningful forensic authentication,” Gourlay wrote.
“The law imposes a relatively low bar for authenticating electronic evidence, and again in most cases there’s no realistic dispute that the evidence is real.”
As the reliability of photos and videos becomes increasingly uncertain in the age of easy digital manipulation, the justice system is losing one of its most trusted forms of objective corroboration — a reliable check on the fallibility of human memory.
“That logic breaks down when there’s a realistic possibility the images themselves have been fabricated,” he continues.
“In this new reality, a witness’s credibility must be assessed before their photo or video can be trusted, reversing the traditional evidentiary hierarchy and introducing a layer of subjectivity into what used to be considered hard, corroborating evidence.”
“In this new digital age, however, there may be times where a bail court needs to dig through the weeds to find the just result,” he said.
Weingarten, who also practises family law, said Peel police’s refusal to investigate his client’s claims reflects the unintended consequences of Ontario’s mandatory‑charging policy, introduced in 1994 to govern police response to domestic‑violence complaints.
But the dangers run in both directions. Ontario courts have repeatedly confronted horrifying cases in which men released on bail for earlier assaults or threats against partners later killed them.
Just this month, Toronto police charged two men with murdering intimate partners after each had previously been arrested — and released — for allegedly committing violence against them.
And there is a valid concern that the constant threat of fake evidence will produce false alarms, “where we wrongly reject genuine evidence out of an excess of skepticism,” Gourlay wrote.
Police departments and Crown offices are going to need to start devoting significant resources to “digital quality control,” he continued.
But neither should defence counsel be complacent, either by assuming that police will willingly shoulder this burden or by assuming they will do it reliably.
“We are going to have to be much more careful.""
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/an-ontario-man-was-jailed-for-eight-months-over-faked-facebook-messages-from-his-ex-wife-why-courts-are-struggling-to-spot-easy-fakes/article_8d8bb089-27f0-45c3-827f-fad133b6521b.html
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/an-ontario-man-was-jailed-for-eight-months-over-faked-facebook-messages-from-his-ex-wife-why-courts-are-struggling-to-spot-easy-fakes/article_8d8bb089-27f0-45c3-827f-fad133b6521b.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
