ONE defence lawyer has dismissed as worthless the evidence of an expert who, in March this year, testified in the ongoing trial of several alleged members of the Klansman Gang that forensic analysis of ballistics retrieved from 10 crime scenes between St Catherine and St Andrew, linked to the gang, had revealed that at least 11 firearms were in play during those times.

Attorney Kimani Brydson, who represents defendants Tomrick Taylor and Daniel McKenzie, in a closing submission before Chief Justice Bryan Sykes at the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston on Tuesday, singled out the evidence of the assistant superintendent of police (ASP) and ballistics expert who had furnished a ballistics match report outlining linkages between crime scenes and firearms, for the tribunal. Those firearms, according to the lawman who was assigned to the State’s forensic lab, “were directly linked to 35 shooting incidents which include at least 27 incidents of murder.

The expert, who said he had been asked by the lead detective on the case to look at 10 firearm-related incidents between St Catherine and St Andrew, allegedly committed by the gang, at the time revealed the code names of five guns linked to those incidents for which the gang has been fingered. He said the “family” of firearms which were code-named and given unique identifiers featured highly in the crimes for which the alleged gangsters are facing trial. In fact, he said of the 10 incidents analysed, nine were reflected on the indictment brought by the Crown.

The expert, at the time, said two firearms — code-named Ersela and Vanzay — on three different occasions featured at the same scene. According to the expert, the weapons were used at the scene of a 2018 murder, in the 2017 shooting of a man called Outlaw, as well as during the 2017 murder of Jermaine Bryan and Cedella Walder. According to the police officer, there was a “strong association” between those two firearms. He also revealed that the firearm code-named Anjanette was the one used in the murder of Xavier Smith, otherwise called Rastaman, on Valentine’s Day in 2018.

But according to Brydson, “the prosecution has not discharged its burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt, not only because of the quality of the evidence or the fact that the witnesses who gave that evidence were witnesses with an interest to serve, but also because the expert witnesses — who should have been deemed to be objective witnesses — did not advance the case for the prosecution any further”.

The attorney said while the presentation by the ballistics expert was brilliant, “its purposes or its use insofar as this criminal trial is concerned is only of academic purposes”. According to the attorney, in his opinion the highly trained lawman “sought to distance his work from the genesis of the material that would have formed the basis of his report [such as] spent casings, bullet fragments and even firearms”, Brydson said.

“His evidence would have been vital in assisting the Crown in its case, certainly as it relates to count two [which charges all 28 remaining accused with membership of a criminal organisation],” Brydson declared.

“I believe it is the evidence of [the] officer that he is ‘assuming’ that the material that forms the subject of the report was taken from the scenes they were said to be taken from,” the attorney said before going on to reference a 2021 Court of Appeal case where that court ruled that an indispensable part of the chain of custody is from the collection to transportation to the forensic laboratory of items retrieved in a criminal investigation.

Said the attorney: “I believe the evidence in the instant case is that the forensic laboratory is where ASP works, and what he is saying is that he can’t say definitively that these items are coming from the places where they are alleged to be coming from, and that concession on the part of the ASP has significantly diminished his evidence insofar as it relates to assisting the Crown in proving that there was a criminal organisation in place”.

“In the meantime, what the ASP conceded to was a common thread or occurrence from the other expert or objective witnesses for the prosecution”, he argued, claiming that those experts also “distanced themselves from the source of the information”.

Said Brydson, “that common pattern amongst those objective witnesses is one of the inefficiencies the prosecution has failed to remedy during this trial”. He also contended that the Crown had failed to establish the existence of a criminal organisation, despite all of the arguments presented.

Mckenzie is charged in the 2017 double murder of the couple while Taylor remains only on the charge of membership in a criminal organisation, as the other counts against him have failed.

Prosecutors had told the court in March as well that the weapons detailed by the expert related to the counts on the indictment and were “system guns”.

“One of these which was tendered into evidence is the .45 [pistol taken from Tareek James O/C CJ [alleged shooter for the gang and one of several bodyguards for Andre “Blackman” Bryan]. It is a system gun, code-named Ersela,” a senior prosecutor said.

“The [two main prosecution] witnesses have spoken about systems guns, in that there are certain firearms that belong to the organisation which it uses to commit crimes — one of them is the .45 [revolver].

“We are saying it is supporting evidence. We are saying the murder at Fisheries, murder of Outlaw, and murders at the bus park — this weapon was used and the evidence for the Fisheries murders is that [Andre ‘Blackman’ Bryan] took the .45 from Tareek James, shot Mr Jermaine Bryan, and handed it back to James who used the same gun and shot Miss Walder,” the prosecutors said then.