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I'm an electrical engineer - I understand the metadata, I really do. It will not matter.

My older brother is a Federal Judge and I think about trying to explain this to him. There is no way he'd understand. The only thing that he'd understand is that if it could be changed it would not be an original document and therefore was inadmissible. At the very best you'd have dueling experts who would contradict each other and the judge is likely to go the traditional route and not admit the electronic photos. Even if the judge admitted the photos, a Durham jury inclined to convict would buy Mike Nifong's argument that the photos had been alterend and the jury would discount the photos.

When I did my little expert witness thing, I remember when the lawyer for our side was deposing the expert witness for the other side. I could not ask the other expert witness anything. I had to use our lawyer as my sock puppet. The other expert witness would answer and I had to tell our lawyer what to ask next. Our lawyer had absolutely no idea what the other expert witness was talking about but our lawyer had to do the questions. (To be fair to our lawyer, I had no idea of the legal implications of anything.)

We who hang out on the internet forget how the average person is completely baffled by the whole thing.