Convicted on screenshots - Man seeks to overturn three-year prison sentence
Published:Thursday | November 22, 2018 | 12:00 AMNickoy Wilson/Gleaner Writer
Found guilty of possession of identity information in the Trelawny Circuit Court on March 10, 2017, based on screenshots of unopened emails, Demetri Hemmings has taken his grouse to the Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction and sentence just nine months into his three-year prison sentence.
Making an application to adduce fresh evidence at the Court of Appeal in downtown Kingston yesterday, his attorney, Isat Buchanan, told the appeal court justices that the trial judge made her decision in the absence of important pieces of information.
He contested that only screenshots of 14 of the 48 emails and two notes found on an iPad, said to be owned by his client, were presented to the court. Buchanan also said that the compact disc (CD), which is believed to contain all the data obtained from the device, was not disclosed to the defence at any time.
He asserted that there was no way of verifying the authenticity of the data found on the device as the data could have been on another device and downloaded on to the next device via an online server.
APPLICATION REFUSED
But Acting Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Sophia Rowe told the court that the fresh evidence should not be adduced as it could have been obtained with minimal effort at the trial.
Although admitting that the CD was not disclosed to the defence, she said that the forensic report gave a sufficient description of all that was in the emails and the notes.
Rowe said enquiry could have been done during the trial stage of the matter.
After a brief deliberation, the panel - consisting of the President of the Court of Appeal Justice Dennis Morrison and Justices Patrick Brooks and Leighton Pusey - refused the application.
After that, Carolyn Reid-Cameron, who is also a member of Hemmings' legal team, said that there were breaks in the device's chain of custody, which brings the integrity of the information on the device into question, which the judge did not bear in mind.
She said that there was no account of what happened on the night of July 22, 2014, when the device was seized and the period between July 23, 2014 and October 2016 when the device came into the hands of the forensic analyst.
The appeal hearing continues today.