Ballistic report disproves police evidence – Sykes
Published:Wednesday | February 22, 2023 | 12:37 AMTanesha Mundle/Gleaner Writer
The evidence of two police witnesses, who claimed they were fired upon multiple times by an alleged Clansman-One Don Gang member, has been disproven by a ballistic report done on the illegal weapon that was reportedly taken from the alleged gangster.
Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, after reviewing the ballistic report Thursday, described the police narrative as “incredible”. This after pointing out that it was impossible for the alleged gangster to have fired at least eight shots at the police when the report showed that the firearm magazine could only accommodate seven rounds.
The two witnesses had testified that they had seized a Sig Sauer weapon with ammunition from defendant Tareek ‘CJ’ James on November 7, 2017, on Monk Street in Spanish Town, St Catherine, after he came out of a car and fired at them in a service vehicle.
One of the cops testified that a cartridge was found with one live round and that James fired twice. The second officer had told the court that James fired three times, but that the gun seems to have jammed on the last occasion and that live rounds were found in the cartridge.
The second officer also testified that although he could not recall how many James had fired, it was over three shots on both occasions.
But Sykes, while reviewing the report, said it not only showed that the firearm had a seven-cartridge capacity but that it was in good working condition.
“You can’t be firing at least six shots and still end up with six shots in a gun that has a magazine capacity of seven. A great mystery. No mystery, it really means that the evidence that Mr James fired at the police is incredible,” he said.
Additionally, the judge said if one were to accept that James fired over three shots twice, it would mean that James would be firing at least eight rounds.
Based on the report, the judge indicated that the analysis done by the ballistic expert on the weapon in question “was neither here nor there”.
The judge made the observation while looking at the overall report of the ballistic expert who was called by the Crown to establish that there were ‘system guns’ used by the gang in 10 firearm-related incidents.
The judge, while noting that the Crown was not able to sustain its cases in six of the incidents, said that in three of the cases, the expert had assigned names to the deceased, which was not in the counts on the indictment. Further, he said there was no evidence presented to establish that the particular individual was the one who was killed in the incidents.
Meanwhile, earlier in the summation, Sykes indicated that the inference that the prosecution was seeking to draw from cell site towers evidence that the alleged leader Andre ‘Blackman’ Bryan and his alleged deputy Jason Brown were in custody while communicating with the main witness between January and August 2019, was not credible.
He said that even though cell site data placed some members of the alleged criminal network in the vicinity of police lock-ups and remand centres, the Crown had not established that the defendants were in custody.
The judge noted that the witness who analysed the cell site data had admitted that he was unable to say definitively that the defendants were in custody when the calls were made.
The expert also admitted that the defendants could have been anywhere in the vicinity of the cell towers that captured the signal.
The judge, as a result, said that while the device may have been in a police lockup – the Crown failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants were in custody and made the call.
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.