KINGSTON, Jamaica — Defence attorney Christopher Townsend on Tuesday sought to have the seven-member jury in the Constable Noel Maitland murder trial rubbish much of the evidence presented to them during the eight-month long case.

Townsend was speaking during his delivery of final arguments to the jury in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston.

“If the puzzle doesn’t fit, you must acquit!” Townsend told the jurors, using a phrase similar to the one made famous by defence attorney Johnnie Cochran in the OJ Simpson trial of the 1990s.

He made the remark before recapping the evidence given by some of the more than 30 witnesses who took the stand in the trial.

Maitland is being tried for murder and preventing the lawful burial of a corpse in relation to the July 12, 2022 disappearance of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Donna-Lee Donaldson. Donaldson, who was a social media influencer, call centre worker and entrepreneur, was last seen at the Chelsea Manor Apartments in St Andrew where Maitland lived.

Townsend used the story of a mongoose placed in a chicken coop to analyse the purely circumstantial evidence that the prosecution has brought against his client.

He said once the case is full of possibilities, there is no way a man should be convicted in “this hotchpotch case”.

“For you to make your finding you will have to look at what the witnesses have said in this case. The prosecution put together 30-odd pieces of a puzzle trying to build a case,” Townsend said

“As his lordship will tell you, this is a circumstantial evidence case. I can give you an example. If you take a mongoose and put that mongoose in a cage with chickens inside there and you batten down the cage, meaning that you locked the door so there is nowhere in the cage for anything to escape,” he continued.

“You go away and come back and see the mongoose on his back with hair in him mouth. The circumstances from that, you can draw the conclusion that the mongoose nyam the chicken. That is what they are trying to do. They called over 30-odd witnesses and locked this cage and said it is must him do something to the young lady,” Townsend said.

“They are trying to prove death by inference because they do not have a body. They are saying given these circumstances the young lady must be dead. That is one of their hurdles. One of the things they have to prove is that Donna Lee was locked in the cage and that it was only Mr Maitland who was there,” he added.

Townsend tried to convince the jurors that the prosecutors fell down in their case when “they themselves proved that she [Donna-Lee] was not in the chicken coop”.

He said that if the testimony from a friend of Donaldson was to be believed, it would mean that Donaldson had left Maitland’s apartment and was on the road after 1 pm on July 12, 2022.

“She said there is evidence that this lady was outside and if she was outside, the chicken left the coop and if the chicken left the coop, the mongoose is no longer responsible for the chicken. She, the [Director of Public Prosecutions, Claudette Thompson] is trying to put the chicken back in the cage. A dominant feature of what her friend heard was traffic. Ladies and gentlemen don’t let anyone take you for a fool. It was clear that she was outside of the apartment. She never said she heard a one horn blow,” Townsend said, before further alluding that Donaldson must have been in traffic.

He added that a cyber-forensics expert who was a witness in the trial explained that Donaldson’s cellphone pinged on a cell tower that was 400 metres away from the apartment.

“Donna Lee was outside the premises. My friend said to you, madam foreman and your members, trust the science and she not talking about obeah. They called a man to come and give you the science. He tells you that at 2:54 pm in the afternoon Donna-Lee’s [phone] was outside of the house at 2:54 pm.

“He said her phone pinged and connected with a tower that was over 400 metres away from the apartment. They told you that the [cyber forensics expert] gave you good evidence and they relied on him.  Donna-Lee was an influencer. They don’t leave their phone, every minute, [they take] picture, picture, picture. [The expert] said it did not ping on the tower it would usually ping when you were in the apartment. It pinged at Dumfries Road which means she was outside. Is not we seh suh. It is the prosecution. That supports what the friend said when she said she heard traffic,” Townsend said.