Audio recordings taken of Judge Nkola Motata’s rantings, allegedly while drunk, are accurate, a witness told the Johannesburg High Court on Friday.
”The audio coincides with what was happening in the evening,” said Lucky Melk, a tenant on the property into whose wall Motata crashed his Jaguar.
However, he pointed out that there were errors with the transcript. He said some of the text in the transcript was inconsistent with the recording. He also said that the second statement on the recording had been incorrectly attributed to him in the transcript.
Melk said there were people constantly moving around at the time of the accident and that he returned to his residence at certain times.
This emerged during a trial within a trial to determine the admissibility of the five audio recordings of Motata’s alleged drunken rantings, taken on the night that he crashed into a Hurlingham, Johannesburg, property in January 2007.
Earlier on Friday, Motata’s lawyer, Danie Dorfling, said some aspects of witness Richard Baird’s testimony were ”untruthful”. Baird is the owner of the Hurlingham property.
Dorfling made the comments in relation to earlier evidence Baird gave about what happened to a memory card on which cellphone recordings of the judge’s rantings were made.
”You describe yourself as being diligent, that’s why you made four back-up copies. You describe yourself as a fastidious person,” the lawyer said — yet, he added, Baird twice dropped the cellphone on which the recordings had been made and 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. — Sapa