Defence accuses cops of manufacturing phone evidence

One of the lawyers representing Portland businessman Everton ‘Beachy Stout’ McDonald has suggested that the police manufactured phone evidence to establish that there were secretly recorded conversations between the businessman and a contract killer on his phone.

Attorney-at-law Courtney Rowe, while marshalling the cross-examination of a computer forensic examination expert, who had extracted the data from the phone, also suggested that the phone was used while in the custody of the Communication Forensics and Cybercrime Unit (CFCU) before the extraction was done.

The contract killer, Denvalyn Minott, who is currently serving a 19-year prison sentence for his role in the murder, previously testified that McDonald hired him to kill his wife for $3 million and that he passed on the job to Oscar Barnes.

According to Minott, the prosecution’s key witness, he secretly recorded about 120 conversations that he had with the businessman on a Samsung Galaxy A31 cell phone, which he handed over to the police when he was arrested.

Some of these conversations were recently played in the Home Circuit Court, where McDonald and Barnes are on trial, before Justice Chester Stamp.

In one of the conversations, McDonald was heard telling Minott not to execute the hit on Saturday at his house as his helper would not be present, and he would not have an alibi.

He was also heard discussing one of the failed attempts on Tonia’s life with Minott and also warning Minott not to show up at his house, where the murder was supposed to take place, without first getting the go-ahead from him.

SAMSUNG A31 OR J?

However, before the audio recordings were played, the computer forensic examination expert, a detective constable, who had extracted the recordings as well as images from an SD card on the Samsung phone, gave evidence about the extraction process and the findings of an extraction report.

However, yesterday he was taken to task over the details presented in the report.

Rowe asked the expert to explain why the file path for the images of Minott that he had taken from the phone indicated that the pictures had been taken by a Samsung J and not a Samsung Galaxy.

Asked to explain how that is possible, he said the file path suggested that the SD card on which the pictures were being stored in the Samsung J7 phone had been removed and placed in the Samsung Galaxy A31 phone.

But Rowe suggested that based on the metadata report, none of the images were extracted from the SD because there was nothing in the file path to make that connection, but the expert insisted that the images were extracted from the SD card.

Noting further that there was nothing in his extraction report to suggest that the recordings were extracted from the SD card file path, Rowe suggested that he did not get the recording from the SD card, but the witness disagreed.

The witness, who also denied tampering with the file path, was also questioned about whether he had used the phone before doing the extraction while it was at CFCU but maintained that he only handled the phone when he was doing the extraction.

Further in the cross-examination, he admitted that he had examined about four other phones but that nothing of probative value was found on those phones .

Regarding the Samsung Galaxy A31 phone, he conceded that although he had extracted other data apart from the recordings and images, he only examined the files that the chief investigating officer instructed him to look at.

The witness, however, denied suggestions that he and the chief investigator had fabricated the data presented.

He also denied a suggestion that the extraction report was in relation to data extracted from another phone and from the Samsung Galaxy A31 phone.

The trial will resume on Tuesday.

tanesha.mundle@gleanerjm.co