Defense bar complaints about TechShare
TO ANYONE WHO CARES WHAT DEFENSE ATTORNEYS THINK:
The Dallas Criminal Defense Bar would like to express its opinion on TechShare as a discovery vehicle. So many criminal cases now involve video evidence. There are body-cam videos, in-car videos, surveillance videos, recorded interviews of witnesses and defendants, and sometimes even a by-stander cell-phone recording. These videos are often very large (in excess of 1 GB) digital files. TechShare does a horrible job of allowing downloads of these large files. Attorneys have tried various “fixes” – changing browsers, changing internet providers, changing computers, etc., but nothing really seems to make a significant difference. Not only is the download speed impossibly slow, but when tasked with a lengthy download, TechShare invariably “fails”. For unknown reasons, the download “fails”, and you have to start all over again. Calls to tech support do nothing to help this. Often, the TechShare system kicks the user off in the middle of a download and the user has to log in again to start the download all over again. It is no exaggeration to say that sometimes it takes in excess of 10 attempts to download one file. And sometimes it is never successful and the attorney must resort to asking the prosecutor to put the file on a hard drive or burn it to a DVD. This download problem with TechShare makes it not an acceptable way of meeting the prosecution’s constitutional and statutory obligations to provide discovery to the defense.
The undersigned criminal defense attorneys just want to make everyone aware of their feelings about how TechShare is working and the problems it is causing the criminal defense bar.
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