United States v. Blechman

The government prosecuted Robert Blechman and Itsik Yass (defendants) for mail fraud and identity theft based partly on records from an AOL email account and a PACER database account allegedly used to commit the crimes; the trial court admitted these account records under the business-records hearsay exception, despite evidence that neither AOL nor PACER verified subscriber-supplied information and that AOL accounts were frequently opened under fictitious names. Blechman was convicted and appealed, arguing the records constituted inadmissible double hearsay since the underlying subscriber information was never verified.