Technicality

[rslade]

A husband was having an affair.

The wife suspected an affair.  So she (using an iPhone) bugged a room where she thought her husband and his lover would be meeting.

Yes, they were having an affair.  In addition, they were planning to kill her.

So she went to the police, and gave them the phone.

In what appears to be an excess of zeal, one of the detectives officially "seized" the phone.

And that's why the recording was thrown out and the attempted murders/conspirators got off scot-free ...

[denbesten]

Apparently consent laws also played into the decision.  Canada requires single-party consent.  Since the wife was not party to the conversation, she was not able to consent to the iPod recording being made.

[vt100]

Sometimes, the absurdity of these situations is downright awful.

[Shannon]

It's almost as if you can't catch a killer without his consent --- unless you're an accomplice...  

[CraginS]

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@Shannon wrote:

It's almost as if you can't catch a killer without his consent --- unless you're an accomplice...  

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Actually, laws regarding consent to record others is a very important part of legal protection of privacy. This is why law enforcement in USA (state and federal) must have a court order or warrant to record individuals without their consent.

Every state in the USA has relevant consent laws. Most (35) require at least one party in the conversation to consent in advance to the recording. These are called single-party consent laws. The rest (15) have laws requiring all parties to consent to the recording. In some states these are called two-party consent, but in reality they all must be treated as all-party consent.

I recommend all take look at the following web pages:

https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations/

https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RECORDING-CONVERSATIONS-CHART.pdf

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations

If you are involved in setting up insider-threat protections with monitoring for a company or other institution, it is absolutely essential you become familiar with recording consent laws, and the use of advance boiler-plate consent statements, very often used in employment agreements.

Grandpa Rob @rslade can you point to the counterpart references for Canadian law that would have more detail and authority than the Wikipedia page @denbesten provided? Wikipedia may be good quick information source, but none of us should rely on it for decisions on the job. See my extended comments about Wikipedia on my Randomness Blog. 

Vladimir @vt100 I think when you add the perspectives of intrusive 1984-style government monitoring and protections against personal or company privacy invasions, you might agree this situation is not so absurd as it seems on the surface.