Abstract
In Court Martial, an episode of the original Star Trek series, Captain James T. Kirk stands trial for culpable negligence in the death of Records Officer Finney on the evidence of a ship's log tape showing that he jettisoned an ion pod containing Finney during a yellow alert, with the Captain maintaining steadfastly that he did not do so until after the ship was on red alert status. In his defense, his counsel demands the right to confront his accuser — the ship's library computer. We explore this episode in considerable detail, giving a logical formalization of the events, and mine the results for insights more general to the evidentiary problems of video/audiotaped evidence from a confrontation right and a cross-examination right point-of-view. These problems can be traced to instances of the fallacy of the strengthened antecedent outside the scope of a referentially opaque operator. A crucial point then follows in a brief section, following which a final section in which a large number of objections are considered and the point of the entire paper will become eminently clear.
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