Judge urges jury to carefully determine authenticity of audio recording
AS time draws closer to a verdict being delivered in the murder trial of Everton “Beachy Stout” Mcdonald and Oscar Barnes, presiding Judge Chester Stamp implored the seven-member jury on Monday to analyse carefully whether to use or discard the evidence of alleged recordings of phone calls, which are being relied on heavily by prosecutors to secure conviction for the murder of Mcdonald’s second wife, Tonia.
The jury is expected to deliberate and return a verdict, before Friday, on the fate of the two men.
“A mention was made that a superintendent [of police], in his analysis, found that all those calls were made from phone numbers attributed to Mr Minott and Mr Mcdonald. You have to decide whether Denvalyn Minott did record these conversations with Mr Mcdonald,” Justice Stamp told the jury.
The recordings are allegedly of phone conversations between Mcdonald and murder convict, Denvalyn “Bubbla” Minott plotting the murder of Tonia.
Tonia was murdered on July 20, 2020 on the main road in Sherwood Forest, Portland. She was repeatedly stabbed, her throat slashed, and her body burned along with the Toyota Axio motor car she was driving.
Minott was soon after captured by the police who had been tipped off that he was possibly involved. He accepted a plea deal and agreed to give evidence against Mcdonald and Barnes in return for a 19-year and 10- month prison sentence that will see him becoming eligible for parole after spending 10 years in prison.
Minott, a fisherman, confessed his guilt to detectives, claiming that Mcdonald hired him for $3 million to kill his wife but that he subcontracted the hit to Barnes, a random man who Minott said he met on a fishing beach in Manchioneal in Portland. Minott claimed that it was Barnes who committed the murder and that he only watched.
While there was substantial evidence pointing to Minott’s involvement, including bloody shoes, the main evidence which stands out against Barnes is Minott’s claim and that Barnes allegedly gave a cautioned statement to the police which they took to mean that he could have some knowledge of the crime.
Minott, in his testimony, told the jury that after Tonia was was killed it was a struggle to obtain the $3 million he said was promised to him by Mcdonald. He claimed that it was during this time that he mysteriously came a across an audio file saved on his phone. He said that when he played it, it turned out to be a recording of a call he earlier had with Mcdonald. Minott claimed that the recordings continued until it amounted to more than 120 audio files.
Defence attorneys representing Mcdonald suggested during their closing argument that Minott doesn’t have the capacity to carry out such an undertaking as he is illiterate and would be required to read and understand to be able to set up the call recording function.
Minott had claimed that he saved the audio files under the name Vybz Kartel, however an expert police witness said the name of the files were SIM1 followed by the date and time of each recording. At the same time, data presented by the expert did not show evidence of the recordings being stored to an SD card that was allegedly inserted in a Samsung A31 cellular phone, as was the claim of Minott.
On Monday, Justice Stamp told the jury that, “You can rely and act upon the evidence of the recorded conversations only if you are sure that the integrity of the phone and the memory card had not been compromised. By that I mean that it is the same phone and memory card that was taken from Denvalyn Minott and nobody tampered with or changed the evidence before analysis.”
The trial continues today.