A New Way to Authenticate Video? State v. Windseth and the Business Records Exception

Special thanks to Sloan Godbey, Summer Law Fellow at UNC SOG, for their significant contributions to this post. In March of last year, I did a thorough review of North Carolina cases addressing the authentication of surveillance video. I created a chart to understand what ingredients are adequate (and inadequate) to lay a foundation. That chart can be found here, and the related blog here. However, a case came down in March of this year that raises significant questions about how video is authenticated, or at least introduces a new potential avenue for authenticating video. I’m afraid my cherished chart may soon be of limited utility. But such is the way the law develops! The Case The case is State v. Windseth, COA24-718, ___ N.C. App. ___ (March 19, 2025). The underlying facts, which involved an investigation into the whereabouts of the defendant’s mother leading to charges against the defendant for fraudulent use of his mother’s bank card, are not of great import to our evidentiary inquiry. The key points for our purposes are that in the course of trying to locate the defendant’s mother, the lead investigator requested information from Wells Fargo, and the bank produced a variety of documents and videos. Slip op. 2-3. The videos originated from ATM surveillance cameras and appeared to show the defendant using his mother’s bank card. At trial, the State attempted to introduce still-shots from the ATM videos through a method I have not seen before in North Carolina caselaw. The State admitted [...]