Magistrate Recommends Default Judgment for Destroyed Evidence
A federal magistrate in Brooklyn is recommending a default judgment against defendants who sought to destroy evidence by secretly replacing his computer.
If the recommendation is adopted, the sanction would be the first default for electronic spoliation within the New York City-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the New York Law Journal reports.
Magistrate Judge Robert Levy said default is appropriate in part because “the destruction of evidence was of the worst sort: intentional, thoroughgoing, and (unsuccessfully) concealed.” He ruled (PDF posted by the New York Law Journal) in a suit contending Zalman Klein had acted with other defendants to misappropriate millions of dollars from a business partner.
An expert report found Klein had backdated the operating system on the new computer to make it appear older, and uploaded thousands of files with the computer clock set to an earlier date, according to the story. Klein then deleted hundreds of files and ran a data recovery program to make sure they were gone, the expert said.
