By William Yaw Owusu
Wedneday May 16, 2007
CONTROVERSY erupted yesterday at the Accra Fast Track High Court during the testimony of an independent voice expert who worked on the secret tape recorded conversation between ACP Kofi Boakye and some suspected narcotic drug dealers.
It all began when Edward Agyemang Duodu, a Principal State Attorney, prosecuting the case wanted Professor John Peter French, an independent forensic scientist with specialty in speech analysis, to ascertain whether a compact disc (CD) player with the voices of the participants which has already been tendered in evidence, was the same one that the prosecution forwarded to London, for analysis.
“My Lord this CD is not the one that I examined although it has the same markings,” the professor told the packed court.
This was at the trial of Kwabena Amaning, also known as Tagor and Alhaji Issah Abass, whose voices were allegedly part of those whose voices were recorded by an unknown person at ACP Boakye’s residence and who have been charged for having knowledge of 76 parcels of cocaine that got missing from the MV Benjamin Vessel at Tema Port in April last year.
He said when J.P. French and Associates, the laboratory which did the analysis received the tape they photographed the CD and saved the picture on their computer.
Professor French told the court that the CD they received from the prosecution had a capacity of 700 megabytes but the one that he was being asked to identify had 650 megabytes, adding that “the handwriting on this exhibit is quite bold.”
Counsel for Tagor Ellis Owusu Fordjour however objected to the playing of the tape to enable Professor French to identify the voices.
“This is the CD that they worked on. From the Professor’s evidence it is clear that he never worked on the tape in evidence. They examined 700 mgbt. CD and not 650.
“The tape they worked on is not in court. If they play it now, it will not be a scientific analysis but a guess work,” counsel contended.
Principal State Attorney Edward Agyemang Duodu insisted that “the CD has already been tendered and we have already indicated to the court that the witness could make the voice identification by either listening to it or examining it physically.”
The court presided over by Justice Jones Dotse of the Court of Appeal overruled defence counsel’s objection saying
although the witness had said the CD was not what he examined, the same witness had also stated that he could identify it through the playing of the CD and should be given the chance to do so.
The CD was then played to the hearing of the court and it took one hour, two minutes and 34 seconds to complete it.
The court again listened to two tapes which Professor French requested the prosecution to submit to enable them compare the voices on the original tape recorded in ACP Boakye’s residence.
Prof. French identified the two voices as those of Tagor and Abass.
Earlier in his testimony Professor French recounted how he came into contact with the prosecution to work on the tape and his work experience.
He said he had been called about 200 times to testify in court cases most of which were similar to the case in question in different countries.
He mentioned prominent trials such as that of Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Yugoslavia and Geneva Prestic which was heard in the Hague, Netherlands, Leonard Kucmak of Ukraine among others as some of the cases in which he testified.
Professor French said he met Mr Joe Ghartey, the Attorney-General (AG) and Minister of Justice in London on September 5, last year who gave him oral instructions as to what to do.
He said the AG. asked him to compare and identify the voices, examine them and see whether the tape had been tampered with or edited.
Professor French said initially they got two transcripts from Radio Gold and the Georgina Wood Committee but because the conversation was partly done in Twi, he contacted the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London and other universities but could not get a Twi expert.
“Finally Dr. Kofi Agyekum was contacted to help translate the Twi words. We also asked them to get us the natural voices of all the participants which they did.”
The court after hearing the tape stood the case down to enable the judge to sit at the Court of Appeal.
Hearing was expected to continue at 2:30 pm yesterday.
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