Your Watch Bears Witness: The Doctrine Of Epistemic Mediation And Machine-Generated Evidence In Indian Criminal Trial
Devyani Rastogi & Gaurish Sharma,O.P. Jindal Global University, Jindal Global Law School
ABSTRACT
Evidence law has traditionally been built to test human testimony, that is, a witness's perception, memory, sincerity, and narration. But an increasing share of criminal evidence today is no longer generated by a human declarant at all. It comes from wearable devices, smart home sensors, and forensic algorithms that sense, process, and interpret physical reality before any human being ever perceives it. Under Indian law, Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 treats this kind of evidence as an ordinary electronic record, verified through a dual certificate and a hash value that establishes the authenticity and integrity, but it says nothing about whether the interpretive process that produced the recorded conclusion was itself reliable.
This article argues that authenticity paradigm is conceptually inadequate to what courts are actually being asked to rely on. It also develops a Doctrine of Epistemic Mediation under which machine-generated evidence is treated as the product of a sequential chain of technological transformations, namely sensing, measurement, signal processing, software processing, algorithmic interpretation, behavioural classification, and legal characterisation, each of which introduces its own, independently assessable risk of error.
Using a hypothetical Indian prosecution modelled on the Connecticut "Fitbit murder" case, the article develops four doctrinal instruments to operationalise this theory: the Principle of Inferential Distance, the Machine Credibility Test, Algorithmic Cross-Examination, and a Digital Forensic Due Process Framework. It builds them within, rather than against, the existing scholarship of Andrea Roth, Edward Imwinkelried, and Sabine Gless.
The article also tests the theory against comparative reasoning from the United States and the European Union, against the constitutional structure of Articles 20(3) and 21 of the Indian Constitution, and against the empirical literature on wearable-sensor accuracy, before candidly examining the limits, objections, and institutional risks of the framework it proposes.
