It depends. If you delete all data after a year pursuant to a well established practice, the court should not be able to hold you in contempt. But if your explanation smacks of destruction of evidence, then you've got a problem. Remember, it's not about what you did, in fact (the judge and the prosecutor can't know that). It's about what the circumstantial suggests you did.
Just to be clear, my assumption was the jurisdiction was US federal law, the entity deleting the data was an individual, the data was their data, and the systems deleting the data were owned by them; this based on the context as I understood it provided by the comment I replied to of this thread.
As such, would you please explain why you provide a timeframe for keeping the data prior to deleting it?
I think he's saying "If you have a policy of deleting your data older than X, you are OK." You have to be able to prove that well before being asked for the data, you had a policy that resulted in it being deleted.
Where I work, we delete emails older than 6 months as a company policy. I have to assume this is done for exactly this reason. Don't ask why we might want to do that, I'm not in charge. :-)
