Chief Justice Bryan Sykes said Wednesday that “not all of the evidence” given by a digital forensics examiner, who was brought in to validate the call data of cellular phone recordings made by a former gang member and handed over to investigators probing the Klansman Gang, “is admissible in law”.

Witness Number One, a former gang member-turned-crown witness, had testified that he turned over to the police three phones with recordings of conversations between himself and members of the gang, including alleged leader Andre “Blackman” Bryan. The witness, who said he started working with the police undercover in 2018 while Bryan was incarcerated, said he downloaded a call recording app to automatically tape multiple cellphone conversations without the knowledge of his cronies. He forwarded the recordings to police when the memory became full. Those recordings were later extracted and entered into the evidence of the trial on compact discs, accompanied by transcripts of the conversations.

But the chief justice, who is in his third week of summation of evidence in the trial, said the Crown’s efforts to ground the evidence from those calls with supporting evidence has been severely challenged.

Wednesday the trial judge said his less than glowing assessment of the cop’s evidence was based on the fact that the lawman derived some of his information from third-party sources, couldn’t say if the numbers associated with the contacts listed in the phones were making or receiving the calls and was unable to assist with the process by which the exchange system of the telecoms companies captured data when calls were being made.

The policeman, who was one of two “experts” brought in by prosecutors to also show the correlation among the recordings, the dates, and the calls in the conversations which featured incarcerated members and others outside as they plotted crimes involving the accused gang members, had been unable to properly explain aspects of the data to attorneys, oftentimes replying that he was “not sure”.

“He had difficulty indicating, he wasn’t very confident as to whether or not the numbers that he gave were the calling or receiving numbers, so the least I can say is that in his examination he was able to say numbers were related to names and that’s about it from my perspective. He couldn’t say if the numbers associated with the contact was making or receiving the calls. Let’s just say he couldn’t assist the Crown too greatly,” the trial judge said.

The trial judge further noted that the only individual brought by the Crown who would speak to the calls being made was Witness Number One. He said the evidence of the representatives from the two telecoms providers, Flow and Digicel, and the cops said to be cyber forensic experts “was inconclusive at best”.

The notations of the trial judge on Wednesday were similar to those he made on Tuesday.

The chief justice will continue his summation when the matter resumes this morning at 10:00 at the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston.