Unmanned flight isn’t new, nor is aerial photography. Hobbyists have been rigging cameras to model airplanes since long before the word “drone” became commonplace. What’s new is the proliferation of massproduced, inexpensive unmanned aircraft with capabilities that surpass anything previously available to civilians. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, there may be 700,000 new drone owners as of New Year’s Day 2016.

There are already a number of articles discussing drones, most of which focus on regulatory schemes and speculation as to how tort law and criminal law will adapt to their widespread use. But this article has a much more mundane focus: When a drone is used to create photographs, audio or video recordings, or other data, how will that evidence be received by the Florida courts? The first section of this article gives a brief background on drones and what manners of evidence can be gathered by them. The second section addresses two statutory exclusionary rules that will play a major role in the law of drone-gathered evidence. Finally, the third section addresses evidentiary predicates for drone-gathered evidence in the Florida courts.

Originally published in TRIAL Advocate Quarterly – Winter 2016.