Digital Forensic Evidence

The book I read to research this post was Digital & Multimedia Forensic Evidence edited by John J Barbara which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. If you are preparing digital forensic evidence for a court case you need to prepare a nontechnical report for people like the judge & jury & a technical report for if the defence team wants to bring in an expert to examine your work. It's important you state what you were looking for on the device, what you found, what laws may or may not have been contravened & why, the methods used & software & hardware used. It's important if the defence bring in an expert to replicate your methods that he finds the same results. To achieve this you should do the test several times & make sure none of the data changes on the device. You use things like write blockers to do that.
One issue that forensic examiners are increasingly asked to examine is child porn & there is a lot of this on peer2peer like the now closed down limewire. Money obviously does change hands when people are acquiring stuff like that & it's worth noting a percentage goes to terrorist & other dubious organisations like the russian mafia.
There is a case in this book where someone murdered his wife & then forged a suicide note which they were able to work out had been written since her death. He did get found guilty but it's a good example of digital forensics. I don't know what they do if someone says they altered the clock on the computer. I suspect if they planned there story out they could get away with it. In there example the letter was produced later on in the case & he claimed he had no memory of writing it & then made out he was working out grief. He also gave the computer to someone else & when it was seized tried to have it declared invalid on the grounds that the new owners had used it.