A judge in the US has asked Amazon to hand over audio recordings from an Amazon Echo which was in a house where two women were murdered back in 2017.
The man accused of their murder has pleaded not guilty and is due to stand trial next year. The women’s bodies were found under the porch of a home in New Hampshire with multiple stab wounds.
The judge has also asked Amazon for any additional data that could lead to the killer being caught, such as which devices were paired with it at the time the women were attacked.
Amazon told the Associated Press it would not hand over anything “without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us”.
But there is still hope for the prosecution, as last year Amazon did eventually agree to hand over data from an Echo that may have been operating at the time of a murder in Arkansas, but this was only after the defendant contested the case.
The Echo is usually activated by a trigger word, such as “Alexa” and then followed by a command. But the Echo has been reported to record additional audio; regardless of whether the trigger word is uttered or not.
