Investigating the Increase in Mobile Phone Evidence in Criminal Activities

The magnification of mobile devices in everyday life prompts the idea that these devices will increasingly have evidential value in criminal cases. While this may have been assumed in digital forensics communities, there has been no empirical evidence to support this idea. This research investigates the extent to which mobile phones are being used in criminal proceedings in the United Kingdom thorough the examination of appeal judgments retrieved from the Westlaw, Lexis Nexis and British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) legal databases. The research identified 537 relevant appeal cases from a dataset of 12,763 criminal cases referring to mobile phones for a period ranging from 1st of January, 2006 to 31st of July, 2011. The empirical analysis indicates that mobile phone evidence is rising over time with some correlations to particular crimes.