1,217 Feet: The Fitbit Data That Helped Convict a Killer

Richard Dabate told a 911 dispatcher that a masked intruder in camouflage had zip-tied him to a chair, shot his wife, and vanished before police arrived. It was December 23, 2015, two days before Christmas, at the family’s home in Ellington, Connecticut. His wife, Connie Dabate, 39, was dead in the basement. Their two sons had already left for school. By his account, the attack happened sometime around 9 a.m., not long after he’d doubled back home to grab a forgotten laptop.

Connie was wearing a Fitbit Charge HR on her waistband. It kept recording after the moment Richard said she died, and what it recorded eventually became the spine of the state’s murder case against him.

Wearable fitness-tracker data (step counts, distance traveled, heart rate, sleep and movement logs) has now been used as evidence in a criminal murder trial, cited in federal civil discovery orders, and run through a commercial analytics platform to support a personal-injury damages claim. In each instance, the underlying legal question was the same: is a consumer device’s internal log reliable enough to stand in for a person’s own testimony about where they were and what they were doing.

What the Fitbit actually recorded

According to the timeline investigators built and prosecutors later presented at trial, Connie’s Fitbit registered movement at 9:23 a.m., the same minute a sensor logged the garage door into the kitchen opening. Between roughly 9:18 and 10:05 a.m., the device recorded 1,217 feet of distance traveled inside the house, according to CNN’s original reporting on the case. She was also active on Facebook during that window, posting videos to her page from her iPhone between 9:40 and 9:46 a.m. Her Fitbit’s movement log stopped at 10:05 a.m.

None of that fit Richard’s story. Detectives calculated that walking from the driveway into the house and down to the basement, where Connie died, would take no more than about 125 feet, roughly a tenth of what the Fitbit logged after the time Richard said an intruder had already killed her. If his account were true, her tracker should have gone still around 9 a.m. Instead it kept logging steps, distance, and elevation changes for close to another hour, while her phone kept posting to a public feed for part of that time too.

Dabate was arrested in April 2017. The Fitbit numbers weren’t the state’s only evidence: cell-tower data, inconsistencies in his own statements to police, and the physical staging of the scene (his own zip ties were tied loosely enough to slip off) all factored into the case. But the tracker’s timeline was the piece that made the alibi mathematically impossible, which is why the press nicknamed it the “Fitbit murder” case almost as soon as the arrest warrant became public.

How a jury got to see that data at all

A number on a screen doesn’t become courtroom evidence just by existing. Before jurors heard about the 1,217 feet, the trial court held what Connecticut calls a Porter hearing: the state’s version of the federal Daubert standard, established by the Connecticut Supreme Court’s 1997 ruling in State v. Porter, which requires a judge to screen novel scientific evidence for testability, known error rates, and acceptance in the relevant field before a jury can hear it.

At that hearing, Dr. Keith Diaz, the Florence Irving Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who runs Columbia’s Wearable Device Reading Center and has published accuracy studies on consumer trackers, testified that Fitbit devices worn on the hip or waistband are, in his research, close to accurate for raw step counts, though they carry roughly a 10% error rate under real-world conditions and tend to overcount rather than undercount. He also testified to a limit that matters more than the step count itself: the timestamps a Fitbit stores are only as reliable as the clock on the phone or computer it last synced with. A tracker doesn’t independently know what time it is; it borrows the time from whatever device it’s paired to. This reflects a wider accuracy gap between what a consumer sleep or activity tracker measures and what it merely infers, covered in more depth elsewhere on this blog.

The device counted motion reliably but told time only by proxy, and that gap between the two is why this kind of evidence gets contested in court at all. The trial judge found the data reliable enough to admit. The jury then had to decide what an hour of recorded movement, corroborated by an independent Facebook timestamp from Connie’s own phone, was worth against a defendant’s competing account.

The verdict, and what survived on appeal

A jury convicted Richard Dabate on May 10, 2022, on all three counts: murder, tampering with physical evidence, and making a false statement to police. He was sentenced on August 18, 2022, to 65 years in prison. He appealed, and on March 10, 2025, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled unanimously, 6-0, in State v. Dabate (SC20749), upholding the conviction.

The appeal is worth reading past the headline. The justices found that the prosecutor had committed four separate instances of what the court called “troubling” impropriety during the trial, including a cross-examination reference to an unrelated, notorious Connecticut homicide. The court still held that none of it, individually or together, had denied Dabate a fair trial. Dabate’s appeal also directly challenged the Fitbit evidence’s reliability and the trial court’s decision to admit it; the Supreme Court affirmed that the Porter hearing had been handled correctly and that the data’s admission was not an abuse of discretion. Nearly eight years after Connie Dabate’s death, the wearable data that opened the case was still the evidence a state supreme court was being asked to relitigate.

Is Fitbit data considered reliable courtroom evidence? In Connecticut, yes, once it clears the same scientific-reliability screening any expert forensic method has to clear, and once a qualified witness can speak to the device model’s known error rate. It isn’t self-authenticating; a party still has to establish how the data was extracted, synced, and interpreted before a jury hears the number.

A civil case got there first, by two years

The Dabate prosecution wasn’t the first time a tracker’s log ended up doing legal work; it was simply the first criminal case to make national headlines. Wearable data had already entered a courtroom in a 2014 Calgary, Alberta personal-injury claim, brought by the law firm McLeod Law on behalf of a former personal trainer injured in a 2010 car accident. Before Fitbits existed, the client’s occupation made her usual activity level easy to describe in general terms; after the accident, her lawyer, McLeod Law partner Simon Muller, needed a way to quantify how far her activity had actually dropped.

Muller had his client wear a Fitbit and ran the resulting data through Vivametrica, a Calgary analytics startup whose Functional Activity Assessment tool compared her step counts and activity levels against population norms for her age and occupation. The output wasn’t a courtroom verdict; legal-tech coverage from the time describes it as one input supporting the claim’s negotiation rather than a case that went to a jury trial on the strength of the tracker alone. Even so, by most accounts of the legal-tech press at the time, it was the first instance of a party affirmatively introducing personal wearable data to support a damages claim, rather than a defendant contesting an injury after the fact.

That posture flipped a few years later, in federal court. In Bartis v. Biomet, Inc., a hip-implant product-liability case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, it was the defense that went looking for the data rather than the plaintiff volunteering it. The plaintiff, Guan Hollins, had disclosed that he wore a Fitbit that logged his steps, heart rate, and sleep, and the defendants moved to compel production of that data to test his claims about diminished activity and mobility. On May 24, 2021, Judge John A. Ross granted the motion in part: he ordered Hollins to produce his Fitbit’s step-count history but let him withhold the heart-rate, sleep, and location fields as irrelevant to the injury claim and unnecessarily invasive. That’s the same category of body-adjacent data that keeps surfacing in the debate over how apps that photograph or video a user should handle biometric information, even outside a lawsuit.

Three cases, three different postures. In Ellington, a tracker’s log contradicted a defendant’s own account of a killing. In Calgary, a plaintiff’s own tracker log was used affirmatively to support her claim. In St. Louis, a defendant used discovery rules to pull an opposing plaintiff’s tracker log and test a claim from the other side. The device did the same job in all three: it logged motion nobody had thought to fabricate a story around.

What determines whether tracker data gets in

Reporting and legal-practice commentary on all three cases converges on the same three questions a court tends to ask before letting wearable data through, regardless of whether the case is criminal or civil.

Was the method behind the number tested and known to be reliable?

This is what a Porter or Daubert hearing exists to establish: not whether the device is popular, but whether an expert can testify to its accuracy and error rate for the measurement being offered, the way Diaz did for Fitbit’s step-count algorithm.

Can the data be tied to the clock, not just the device?

A tracker’s step count is a property of its own accelerometer; its timestamp is borrowed from a paired phone or account. Any argument about when something happened has to establish that the synced clock was itself accurate, which is exactly the vulnerability the defense in Dabate tried, unsuccessfully, to exploit.

Is the data relevant to a fact actually in dispute, and no more than that?

Judge Ross’s Biomet ruling illustrates the limiting principle directly: step counts were fair game because activity level was the claim at issue, but sleep and location data were excluded because the case wasn’t about either one. A court will often narrow a tracker’s export to the fields that answer the question in front of it rather than turning over the whole device history.

The part neither side controls

There’s a detail in the Dabate case that both sides eventually had to reckon with, and it says something about wearable evidence generally: nobody involved built the Fitbit to testify in court, and nobody involved chose what it would end up proving. Connie Dabate put a fitness tracker on that morning to count her workout, not to build a murder timeline. The device’s only job was cheap, indifferent motion-counting, running in the background of an ordinary day. That indifference is what made it useful to a jury eight years later: it had no story to tell, no side to take, and no memory to second-guess itself with. It just kept logging feet until it didn’t.

The same holds whenever a step count, a sleep log, or a heart-rate reading gets pulled into evidence. The device isn’t a witness in any conventional sense, and courts are still working out, case by case, how much weight to give something that recorded a fact without ever intending to. A quieter version of that same question is already showing up outside the courtroom: gig platforms and a few employers now ask workers for comparable digital proof of a wake-up before a shift, with none of a Porter hearing’s scrutiny over whether the record is accurate enough to rely on.