A video interview with a rape victim hadn't been recorded on a DVD correctly. But Seagate technicians were able to reconstruct the digital file in time for the trial judge to review it. As a result, a 40-year-old Santa Cruz County man is facing the prospect of a long prison sentence.

Thanks to some quick work at Seagate Recovery Services, a confessed rapist will get the punishment he deserves after almost wriggling out of a harsher sentence because the most important piece of evidence was believed lost forever.

Forty-year-old Michael Barnes is currently behind bars in a Santa Cruz County, Calif., jail awaiting sentencing. He faces more than 20 years in prison for raping three women and kidnapping one of them.

In January of 2008, Barnes went to a local bar and allegedly kidnapped and raped a woman he met while there. After the victim reported the crime, she was interviewed by a deputy sheriff who used a video recorder to document the testimony. Later the video data was transferred to a DVD.

The deputy successfully filmed the interview, but he filed a rambling, error-filled, conflicting report that raised a lot of questions with the court.

It turned out that the DVD, which recorded the victim's testimony and emotions immediately after the crime took place, hadn't been burned correctly. The original tape in the camera became corrupted, preventing any further DVD copies.

Barnes had originally pled guilty in the rape/kidnapping case. Then the defense in the case claimed in court that the testimony on the then-inaccessible DVD contained exculpatory evidence that would have exonerated Barnes.

Without the video and after the trial judge refused to accept the deputy's garbled report as evidence, Barnes' attorney argued that his client should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea. But the judge disallowed the request -- dependent upon viewing the video.

However, without the video record of the victim's statement after the attack, it looked like Barnes would be eligible for a lesser sentence.

DVD Looked Like a Lost Cause

A local data recovery business tried to restore the video but claimed that the data would never be recovered, frustrating both the victim and Andrew Isaac, the district attorney trying the case. Isaac tried for two weeks - and spent a large sum of money in the process - to extricate the video data from the DVD and move it onto one that could be viewed. No one could do it, inside the DA's office or outside.

"We had no way to prove to the judge that the testimony on the DVD was actually incriminating evidence," Isaac said. "So there was a great deal of interest in getting the video back so we could view it."

As it turned out, Isaac had a friend who suggested he have the data recovery department of the company he worked for, Seagate Technology, try to get the data off the faulty disk. So Isaac, facing a court deadline, brought the original recording to SRS (Seagate Recovery Services), hoping for nothing less than a miracle.

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