Witness testimony continued at the Peter Mallory trial Friday with Scott Lewis, digital evidence analyst and investigator for the LaGrange Police Department, identifying over 25,000 images of suspected child pornography that was recovered from four of the six drives seized at Mallory’s TV station, TV-33 on April 27, 2011.
Lewis was then asked by prosecuting attorney Kevin McMurry to describe how downloading movies works when using torrents. He described that a movie would need to be typed in the search bar, then it would download an “instruction” sheet to send out to other users to let them know what is needed.
Lewis confirmed that he conducted a virus scan on the drives, due to the some assumptions that child porn can come from viruses. He did find two viruses, one for ad ware and one a Trojan virus, but related it to having viruses on his computer before, but never having encountered any viruses containing child porn.
“There’s no way a virus could have put these images on all of these devices. There’s no way.” said Lewis.
According to Lewis and slides from the drives showed to the court, many of the images were downloaded as early as March 2010 and were last viewed on April 24 -25, 2011, just days before the search of Mallory’s station.
Lewis testified that a virus scan software could have accessed some of the files that were accessed just seconds apart, however, it is least likely that a virus could have accessed the files that were accessed minutes and hours apart.
Videos were shown of Mallory secretly recording the crotch areas of some people that would sit in a chair at a desk in his office. Mallory’s face could be seen on the cameras as he positioned it to to focus on the seat areas of the chairs. A female was seated in the chair in majority of the videos, and children were shown on a few.
Defense attorney John Garland argues that anyone could have accessed the computers, after Lewis’ account after he used it because a password wasn’t necessary to log on to the computer; and after viewing the Mallory’s hidden videos it could be seen that people in the video were using the computers in his office.
He also argued that after Lewis’ explanation of virus software being able to access files, there is no way to tell whether the files were accessed by the virus software or any person that could have been using the computer.
Lewis was the only witness to testify on Friday.
Post a Comment
