Tesha Miller will on March 27 be allowed to appeal his 38 years at hard labour sentence for masterminding the 2008 murder of former chairman of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company Douglas Chambers.

Miller is the alleged leader of the Spanish Town, St Catherine-based Klansman Gang.

In an amended notice of application, which was filed on December 22, 2022, Miller last week requested the typewritten transcript of the original sentencing and resentencing for the Crown witness whose testimony helped to put him in prison.

He further requested a written report from sentencing judge Justice Georgiana Fraser and a certified copy of her notes of the trial. He also sought permission of the court to, among other things, adduce fresh evidence on appeal.

According to attorneys for Miller, the material requested, and other orders sought, are relevant to the issues determined in the appeal.

According to the lawyers, “If received, the reports, notes, audio, affidavits, and statements would inform the basis of the grounds filed and could serve a ‘useful purpose’ in assisting the parties and the court in narrowing issues demarcated in the application for leave to appeal the applicant’s conviction.”

They said that Miller and the fair hearing of his appeal “will be significantly prejudiced if this honourable court does not grant the orders sought”.

The Appeal Court, in ordering that the application be “granted in part”, ordered that its registrar request, as a matter of urgency from the Supreme Court, the typewritten transcript of the plea proceedings conducted in November of 2019 for the Crown witness who testified against Miller as well as the audio recording of Miller’s trial over that period.

Copies of the material, when received, should be supplied to Miller and the Crown, it said.

The Appeal Court further ruled that the application to adduce fresh evidence will be determined at the hearing of the application for leave to appeal the matter come March 27.

It, in the meantime, however, refused the application for the typewritten transcript of the original sentencing exercise for the Crown witness, the written report of the sentencing judge of her opinion on the case generally, as well as the certified copy of the whole of the notes taken in the trial by the trial judge.

“The applicant has also requested the transcript of the original sentencing exercise for Mr [Crown witness]. In our view, this would certainly take this court into the realm of facilitating a fishing exercise by the applicant’s attorneys-at-law. We will not allow it. It is not necessary for a determination of the application for leave to appeal. There certainly is no material connecting that exercise to the applicant,” the Appeal Court said.

It said the court had also concluded that it is “neither necessary nor expedient” for it to request a report from and the notes of the learned judge in this matter.

“They are not necessary for the just determination of the application for leave to appeal. We do not see it as necessary or expedient in the interests of justice to request that the audio recording be transcribed, especially bearing in mind that the court reporters would have utilised the recording to prepare the transcript of the proceedings at the trial,” the court said further.

Miller was convicted in the Home Circuit Court in December 2019 after a trial in which the prosecution led evidence from a witness who alleged that he was a former member of a gang led by Miller and he had given orders and arranged for Chambers to be killed and then arranged for the shooter to be sent to the Cayman Islands on a boat to evade the police.

Miller, who was charged with the offences of being an accessory before the fact and after the fact in relation to the killing, was sentenced in January of 2020 to 38 years and nine months’ imprisonment at hard labour, while the sentence imposed on him for the offence of accessory after the fact was 18 months’ imprisonment at hard labour.

The sentences are to run concurrently.