Verifiable through the issuing bodies. The GCFE and GCFA tiles below specifically tie to criminal-court admissibility — Rule 702 reliability and KRE 901 authentication — the points most often raised in suppression motions and Daubert challenges to forensic methodology.
Four pieces of criminal-defense forensics work that turn up in nearly every Kentucky engagement. Each maps to an admissibility rule that a judge will scrutinize.
- Chain of custody — written chain beginning at seizure, every transfer documented with date, actor, and verification hash; defensible against Franks v. Delaware and Daubert challenges to authenticity and integrity.
- Device seizure & on-scene triage — what an attorney should order when police seize a client phone, computer, or storage device; preserving original state, RF shielding in Faraday bags, and the image-vs-original distinction that controls later admissibility.
- Forensic imaging — bit-for-bit (forensic) image with SHA-256 verification, write-blocked acquisition, and the EnCase / Cellebrite toolchain; hash values travel with the evidence so any tampering is detectable.
- Rule 702 / KRE 702 / Daubert qualification — credential-based admissibility, methodology peer-review pathway, and known-error-rate citation pattern established in every expert report before deposition or trial.
Anonymous, abstracted examples drawn from criminal-defense engagements — these are illustrative, not testimonials, and contain no identifying facts.
Drug-possession case — Signal messages on a locked Android
A client was charged after police obtained a warrant and physically seized an Android phone. Defense counsel retained me to independently image the device after counsel was concerned that Signal messages cited in the warrant affidavit might have been recovered by an unreliable tool. Using Cellebrite physical extraction under a documented chain of custody, I produced a verified forensic image with SHA-256 hash, recovered the Signal database, and prepared a report comparing the warrant’s attributed timestamps against the device’s actual clock state. The recovery established that messages could not have been sent at the times alleged, and the case resolved short of trial.
DUI case — challenging the intoxilyzer-ancillary phone-data pull
In a DUI case where the Commonwealth introduced location and message data pulled from the defendant’s phone as corroboration for the stop, defense counsel retained me to examine the extraction. The original analyst had relied on a logical (not physical) extraction that missed deleted background app processes, and the reported timestamps were UTC rather than local Kentucky time. I produced a forensic image, reconstructed a corrected local-time timeline, and showed at deposition that a significant portion of the attributed activity was from automated background processes rather than user actions. The Commonwealth declined to introduce the phone evidence at trial.
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