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| For obvious reasons, the following diary contains no names. It also contains no specific dates or places. |
In cross-examination, Defence had the witness confirm that the strongest signal map did not represent exclusively the areas in which each base station would handle a call, and that if a stronger base station was congested a call could be picked up by another base station. Clearly Defence was trying to establish as large an area as possible for the location of Accused A when the call in question was made.
During the morning tea break, I cleaned off the whiteboard in the jury room, on which I had progressively been writing the names of all the witnesses for our easy reference, and rewrote them much smaller, so we could have some room left over. I began writing down events on the day Deceased disappeared up until the next morning, with times where known. Many events had exact times given by various records, while others were estimates from witness accounts.
In discussion of the evidence, I got the impression that Juror B was still extremely sceptical about any of the evidence actually indicating with any degree of certainty that the Accused were involved in Deceased's death. She postulated lots of other explanations and generally seemed unwilling to believe, based on the evidence we'd seen so far, that Crown had proven the case for the prosecution. Juror A, who has been playing devil's advocate to all suggestions, either for or against the case, all along, did so again here. Juror J also argued that some of the evidence we had heard lately regarding the chain and the mobile phone calls was very strong and could not be so easily discounted. Juror D mentioned again points about Deceased's car, including the inconsistency in the cleanliness of it and the odd circumstance of Witness 26 not having any film in the camera used to take evidence photos, pointing at some sort of police coverup or conspiracy, perhaps to protect Witness 35 and frame Accused A. I said I found it hard to believe the police would do something that blatant, but Jurors D, B, and I disagreed, saying that was just the sort of thing police did.
At this point, I feel that once the evidence ends and we begin deliberation, there is not going to be anything like a consensus, and that we will have to have some very long and involved discussions before people might start changing their minds and converging towards a unanimous verdict.
Witness 55. Mobile phone network technician for Accused B's mobile network. Crown tendered another series of maps, this time showing much the same as Witness 54's maps, but for the base station through which Accused B's phone call was made in the area of the same river. In this case, the base station was situated along the main road, in a valley, mainly to provide coverage along the stretch of road. Coverage from the station also extended across the river to some degree. There were areas near the river where the coverage overlapped that for the station which picked up Accused A's call.
Defence agains made some tedious and pedantic points on topics which we in the jury understood very well by now.
Witness 56. Mobile phone network technical expert witness. This witness worked for a third telecommunications provider, and was present to elaborate on and confirm the analyses and data given by the previous two witnesses. As such, he added nothing new to what we had already heard, and the jury really struggled to stay awake throughout this witness' testimony.
The points covered by Crown and Defence with the previous two witnesses were all gone through again, for both sets of maps, base stations, and mobile phone networks. In addition, this witness was extremely verbose and rambling, taking long journeys through tangentially related technical details before answering every question put to him. Several times throughout his evidence, the barristers or the judge actually had to stop him and ask him to refocus on the question at hand.
At one point, after an interruption by the judge, the witness said, "Sorry, have I gone into a bit too much detail there?"
Defence answered, "I have to say, yes."
We knew we were in for trouble when the witness was sworn in and Crown asked him to give his name and occupation, and the witness launched into a 5-minute overview of his educational qualifications, experience, and career, as though beginning a job interview.
Eventually the afternoon drew to a close, with questioning of this witness finished, and we were dismissed for the day.
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