Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Chain of custody is a concept in jurisprudence which applies to the handling of evidence. Because evidence can be used in court to convict persons of crimes, it must be handled in a scrupulously careful manner to avoid later allegations of tampering or misconduct. An identifiable person must always have the physical custody of a piece of evidence. In practice, this means that a police officer or detective will take charge of a piece of evidence, document its collection, and hand it over to an evidence clerk for storage in a secure place. This transaction, and every succeeding transaction between the collection of the evidence and its appearance in court, should be completely documented. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it. Compare with: provenance This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.