Admissibility decision in Motata trial due next week

Judgement on the admissibility of five cellphone recordings taken at the scene of an alleged drunken-driving accident involving Pretoria High Court Judge Nkola Motata is expected next week.

In the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Thursday, magistrate Desmond Nair postponed the case to give the prosecutors and defence time to prepare their heads of argument. These would be presented on Monday and Nair would make his ruling on Tuesday.

It is hoped that by Wednesday the full drunken-driving trial would resume.

Earlier on Thursday, criminal law professor Daniel Petrus van der Merwe said an expert given access to the laptop the cellphone recordings were downloaded on to might possibly be able to determine if any changes had been made.

He said the difficulty with detecting changes on digital data was that essentially there was no original, only perhaps a printout of something.

“[Analogue] is a physical medium that runs sequentially from beginning to end, whereas the digital medium is an invisible medium.”

He said the fact that different generations of copies were made or downloaded of digital data always brought in an element of uncertainty.

“Every time data is sent from one medium to another something may get lost in transmission,” he said.

Motata faces charges of drunken driving and defeating the ends of justice for allegedly resisting arrest on January 6 2007.

This after he crashed his Jaguar into the wall of a Hurlingham, Johannesburg, property, allegedly while drunk.—Sapa