Ballistics evidence played a major role in the just-concluded Braeton 7 trial, as the prosecution and defence teams tried to use it to show if bullets were fired from inside or outside the death house.

But even as evidence was trotted out for the trial, which ended with six cops cleared of murdering seven young boys in a St Catherine home in 2001, questions were again being raised about the government’s failure to replace the island’s only ballistics testing machine.

The machine has been broken for the last four years and the National Security Ministry is still unable to say when they will be able to replace it.

The machine costs $1 million, according to permanent secretary Gilbert Scott. “There is no definite time (when the machine will be bought). It will be some time during the course of this year,” he told the Sunday Observer. “It is something that we are actively pursuing.”

Meanwhile, police officers have to manually wade through the steps that the machine would have quickly gone through.

“It has been back to the old system, which is time-consuming and uses a lot of energy,” said Superintendent F Hibbert, the head of the ballistics department.

This means that the defendants in cases that require ballistics testing sometimes languish in jail as the checks are painstakingly made by using the antiquated ballistic comparison microscope method, which was developed more than 70 years ago.

When a bullet is ejected from the barrel of a gun it takes on distinctive markings. When the bullet is examined by a firearms expert, these markings can link guns to crime scenes and help the police solve cases.

But Jamaica Labour Party deputy spokesman on National Security and attorney-at-law Clive Mullings said he is suspicious of the manual methods used at the forensic laboratory. The accuracy of the results may be compromised due to human error, he said.

“I don’t know if you can rely on what you get from the lab. There must be a margin of error and it leaves you to wonder how wide that margin is,” Mullings said.

But former Commissioner of Police Francis Forbes had batted for the reliability of the manual process in 2003. His concern, then, when he spoke of the need to replace the broken machine, had been the increased length of time it took to complete cases and the loss of the ability to quickly check a database for information needed.

“I think the greatest value of the equipment is that we were able to create a computerised database of all the spent shells that were recovered,” Forbes had said at a meeting in Montego Bay. “And when we were checking a spent shell that was found in Kingston we could check it in the database against those found in Montego Bay, Hanover, wherever it was. So that was the value of that system.”

That value has now been lost as the Drugfire machine fell victim to the Y2K bug. It had been repaired three times before, but by the time it crashed in 2001, the manufacturer – the US-based Mnemonic Systems Incorporated – was out of business. The Drugfire machine was once popular with the US-based Federal Bureau of

Investigation, which relied on it for collecting evidence from firearms, bullets and bullet fragments. However, in 1998, after the FBI agreed to join the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the use of the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), the manufacturers of the Drugfire machine closed shop.

The machine that the Jamaican police had used for years, before it crashed, now lies rotting at the ballistics department in Kingston.

And the police, already burdened by a heavy crime rate and a general lack of resources, are getting impatient after four years of waiting for the new IBIS machine that is used in over 300 crime laboratories in the United States.

“Right now our hands are tied,” Assistant Commissioner of Police Leon Rose told the Sunday Observer. “It puts a strain on the system. The machine will allow us to resolve cases more speedily.”

According to some lawyers, it now takes an average of two months for a ballistic certificate to be prepared for a court case involving a gun crime.

In most of these cases, bail is denied to the defendant – especially when his hands test positive for gunpowder residue, attorneys said.

“It (ballistics testing) really takes a couple of months, in a lot of instances. It is very slow,” said defence lawyer Miguel Lorne.

“When you want to make a bail application, there are some judges who do not want to hear an application if the file is not complete, and the accused person remains locked up until the file is ready. We have clients who have been through it.”

Attorney Jacqueline Cummings understands exactly what Lorne is talking about. “I am involved in a case right now and the ballistic certificate is not yet ready.

The young man has been in jail since last year,” she said. “It takes anything between two to three months for a ballistic certificate to be ready, and that certainly puts the court system under pressure.”

The Sunday Observer was unable to find out exactly how many cases are now before the Gun Court and how many are being held up because of the absence of a working ballistics testing machine. Compiling of that information also has to be done manually, one Gun Court insider said.

“It is done manually and it would take a long time. We don’t have a computer system yet, so those figures are not readily available,” said the source.

The ballistics department, which has sent guns from several major cases abroad for testing, said there was no pile-up of items, at their offices, that needed testing, even though that is the only place in the island where comparisons can be done of firearms, shell casings and bullets which are recovered from crime scenes.

Over the last five years, 6,840 people were shot and injured across the island.

Before it stopped working, the Drugfire equipment was used to trace one gun as it wound its way across four parishes where it was used in a total of 42 shooting incidents, according to former Police Commissioner Forbes.

During his January 2003 meeting with business interests in Montego Bay, Forbes had stressed the urgent need to replace the Drugfire machine.

“I think we now have to look towards getting a similar piece of equipment as quickly as we can, because that’s the only way we are going to be able to cope with the number of crime scenes where guns are used,” he said then. Two years later, the equipment is still on the police force’s list of needed items.

Last week, former police chief Colonel Trevor McMillan lambasted the government for its failure to replace the broken machinery.

“If it is a piece of equipment that is so vital to solving crime and they (the police) have been starved of getting it, then it is obviously negligence on the part of the authorities,” McMillan said. “I am quite sure that the money spent to buy some things that have been bought recently would have been better spent on the ballistics equipment.”