Some aspects of witness Richard Baird’s testimony were ”untruthful”, the lawyer for Judge Nkola Motata told his drunken-driving trial at the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Friday.
”Mr Baird, you are being untruthful,” said lawyer Danie Dorfling.
Dorfling made the comments in relation to earlier evidence Baird gave about what happened to a memory card on which cellphone recordings of the judges rantings, allegedly while he was drunk, were made.
Baird is the owner of a Hurlingham, Johannesburg, property into the wall of which Motata crashed his Jaguar, allegedly while drunk, on January 6 2007.
A trial-within-a-trial is currently under way to determine the admissibility of the recordings as evidence.
”You describe yourself as being diligent, that’s why you made four back-up copies. You describe yourself as a fastidious person,” Dorfling said. Yet Dorfling said Baird twice dropped the cellphone on which the recordings had been made and had had his digital camera and the memory card stolen.
He said Baird had ”not bothered” to check if copies of the recordings he handed to the police were working, or if he had the right memory card with him in court.
Dorfling also said Baird accidentally deleted three of the pictures he took on the night of the incident, and that one working copy of one of the recordings was missing some data.
The original recordings were made in MP4 format, but working copies in MP3 were made for the court.
Dorfling said the court had no guarantee that what they had been shown of the recordings was ”a complete version of what was available”.
Baird denied he was being untruthful. He said the defence was not looking at two important sources that could verify the authenticity of the recordings.
He said the Sunday Times had a made a recording from his cellphone. He also said an encrypted complete version of the recordings was available on his laptop. The file missing some data was only an MP3 working copy.
”This encrypted evidence is the best so far,” said Baird. — Sapa