Court admits some phone data evidence, tosses other sections
Published:Thursday | February 16, 2023 | 1:26 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
Portions of the phone data evidence given by a police expert witness about alleged members of the Clansman-One Don Gang are admissible.
Chief Justice Bryan Sykes made the disclosure while assessing the expert witness’ evidence during his summation in the ongoing gang trial in the Home Circuit Court.
The police sergeant, who is assigned to the Communication Forensics and Cybercrime Division as a communications analyst, gave evidence about the phone data, including call records, text messages, subscriber and cell site information, which he had collected from the two main telecommunications service providers and analysed.
The witness had referred to calls being placed by a number identified as ‘Teacher 4’ and another number identified as ‘City 4’, which was the receiver in a separate instance. The trial was previously told that ‘Teacher’ was one of reputed leader Andre ‘Blackman’ Bryan’s nicknames, while defendant Jason Brown is also known as ‘City Puss’.
He further shared that he was able to attribute names and aliases to the callers and receivers based on text messages, witness statements, subscriber information, and the contact list that were in the three cellphones that were used by a former gang member to secretly record conversations with alleged gang members.
But the judge said: “When Detective Sergeant … is giving his evidence and he is making connections between contacts and names, not all of that evidence is admissible in law because he derived his information from third-party sources.”
The judge said that the witness did not indicate whether he had carried out his own examination of the phones and had lifted the numbers and contacts.
Justice Sykes explained that the names and numbers were extracted from the phones by another officer, who only did the extraction. The examination of the extracted data, he noted, was done by another officer, who tried to establish a connection between the numbers and names.
Those names and numbers, the judge said, were inputted by the ex-gangster based on his evidence.
Consequently, he said: “If he (the expert witness) makes an attribution that is not coming from the evidence, that is useless.”
The judge said the expert witness would have relied on police statements and possibly briefings, the contents of which are not in evidence.
In order for the evidence to be admissible, Justice Sykes said it would have to be preceded by the evidence of the two other police witnesses.
At the same time, the judge said there was phone data evidence that was presented by police witnesses that supported the testimony of the ex-gangster on at least two occasions.
He pointed to an incident on January 25, 2019, in which the ex-gangster testified that he had tipped off the police about a shooting that was planned by the gang and that he had recorded a call that he placed to his cronies while they were on their way. The recording also captured the voices of two police investigators.
Justice Sykes said the phone data evidence that was presented by two police expert witnesses in relation to that incident had the same time and date as well as the duration of the call, and at the very least, showed some consistency.
In the other instance, he said a 47-minute call that the ex-gangster had testified about receiving on January 8, 2019, also had the same time and date in the information that was received from the phone company. In this case, he said it was fairly obvious that that bit of data supported the ex-gangster’s testimony.
Twenty-seven defendants are being tried on an indictment with 14 counts under the Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organizations) Act and the Firearms Act.
Five others were earlier freed while another was killed while on bail last August.
Justice Sykes will continue his summation today.