The police is accused of tampering with the evidence.

My comments:

If you read Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple or some other detective stories, you’ll often find people saying: “Don’t touch anything” at a crime scene.

That is because every piece of object at the scene of the crime can be very useful in that it may provide a vital clue as to who has committed the crime and how it’s been done.

In other words, everything there may be later used as “evidence” – information used in the courtroom to prove someone’s guilt of a crime.

If you “tamper with evidence”, then you deliberately touch, move or damage something found at the crime scene, usually with the intent of misleading the investigation.

Now, if the police are accused of tampering with the evidence, then it is they who are accused of harboring that ulterior motive. For example, they have someone in mind and want to frame him – so they tamper with the evidence to give the appearance of that someone committing the crime.

Fortunately, most legal systems have stipulations that simply outlaw tampered evidences being accepted in court as, well, evidence.

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本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.