Saturday, March 21, 2015

Jana Duty Aids and Abets Evidence Suppression


"For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful
Have opened against me;
They have spoken against me with a lying tongue."
Psalm 109:2

While the Travis County District Attorney's office remains an embarrassment, our neighbor to the north continues to not do much better:
GEORGETOWN — The Williamson County district attorney’s office has fired back against accusations that it withheld evidence before a capital murder trial last year, according to court documents.

A former employee for the district attorney’s office could not have seen time stamps on a Wal-Mart surveillance video before the trial of Crispin Harmel — as alleged this week by the defense — because the video was played on a computer that did not have the correct software to show them, said Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty in court documents filed Thursday.

Harmel’s case, which ended in a mistrial in May, was scheduled to be retried March 30.

....

Prosecutors gave the defense a copy of the video before the May 2014 trial without any time stamps on it, according to the documents. But Jernigan said prosecutors already knew about the time stamps because former investigator Royger Harris said, in an affidavit filed March 11, that the video had time stamps when he watched it with Duty before May 2013, according to the court filings.

Duty responded in court documents filed Thursday that the computer in her office on which Harris watched the video only recorded time on a “counter” and not on time stamps. A counter shows the amount of time it takes to record a video and not the actual time of day the video was recorded.
Read the whole thing here.

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