It's actually cluelessness, but in a good way. They know ahead of time that they don't know which items might be important evidence. Law enforcement officials collect everything and sort it out later. It's really hard to go back for something that you find out you should have collected but didn't.

Seizing equipment is not just for digital evidence either. There might be physical evidence. At the beginning, you don't always know what is important and what isn't, what belongs to whom, and so on.

Your analogy to the murder victim is invalid though. Law enforcement and court officials will have access to the evidence. Also, a coronor won't necessarily not do parts of an autopsy because someone already told them what happened. Examination does not only support a story, but also rules out other stories.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>

In reply to Re^2: Perlmonk needs your help! by brian_d_foy
in thread Perlmonk needs your help! by gellyfish

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.