Lack of a Backup Could Free a Killer

In a criminal case in Miami in 2009, a man named Randy Chaviano was convicted of second-degree murder committed in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison. As usual, a court stenographer was taking notes at the trial. But then there was a string of coincidences worthy of a Law & Order script.

• The stenographer didn’t have enough paper for her machine — a mistake she’d apparently made before
• Consequently, the notes she took were recorded only in the machine’s internal memory
• She transferred the stenography machine’s records to her own PC
• She deleted the records from the stenography machine
• She didn’t do a backup of the PC
• A virus hit the PC and deleted what was by then the only record of the trial, leaving only a pretrial hearing and closing arguments; it wasn’t clear when this happened