State Releases New George Zimmerman Discovery
Posted on Tue Dec 04, 2012 at 07:40:45 PM EST
Tags: George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin (all tags)
The State's Attorney's Office today published non-protected material contained in the 9th Supplemental Discovery Release. It consists of additional FBI reports and interviews, some photographs, one recorded interview and some FDLE reports (short summaries of actions taken.) Zimmerman's attorneys have made some of the FBI reports available here.
What I found most interesting were three FDLE reports on for April 2, 2012, the day the state interviewed Witness #8, aka Trayvon's phone friend "Dee Dee." (background here.)[More...]
- Report of 4/2 Interview by Agent Kenneth Moore: This is the day State's attorney De La Rionda and Investigator T.C. O'Steen interviewed Trayvon Martin's parents and Dee Dee at Trayvon's mother's apartment in Miami.
Moore and another officer picked them up at the Miami airport at 12:30 p.m. (They were supposed to arrive at 10:45 am.) En route to Sybrina Fulton's, De La Rionda explained to Moore they would be interviewing Trayvon's parents and girlfriend at Sybrina Fulton's apartment. Trayvon's girlfriend "possibly" lived somewhere else. Another officer, Gaylon White, conducted surveillance of the area to make sure there was no media.
The Martins' 3 lawyers, Crump, Parks and Jackson were present.
They interviewed Sybrina Fulton first, at 3:40 pm, and then Tracy Martin, who arrived at 4:30 pm. When Tracy's interview wrapped up, they were ready for Dee Dee but they couldn't find her. They drove to Broward County where they found her at 6:30 pm, and she went willingly with them to Sybrina Fulton's residence for her interview. They then returned her to Broward and at 8:15, drove De la Rionda and Investigator O'Steen back to the airport to fly home.
- On August 2, 2012, Moore and White picked up a witness (my assumption: Dee Dee) in Northwest Miami Dade and drove her to the Ft. Lauderdale airport where she flew to Jacksonville to meet with the State's Attorney.
- On August 3, 2012, Moore and White picked up the witness at the Fort Lauderdale airport upon her arrival from Jacksonville and drove her to a home in Northwest Miami Dade.
Why this witness is likely Dee Dee: From Mark O'Mara's Motion to Compel Benjamin Crump to produce the original recording of his March 19 interview with Dee Dee, and the recording device, to the FDLE:
On April 2, 2012, Witness 8 was interviewed by Mr. de Ia Rionda at the home of Ms. Sybrina Fulton. The interview was recorded and has been provided to the defense in discovery. Witness 8 has been listed as a "Category A" witness and is expected to be the state's "star witness" at trial. Since the interview in April, Witness 8 has traveled on at least one occasion from South Florida to Jacksonville to meet with prosecutors. While no further reports or recorded interviews of those meetings have been provided in discovery as of this date, it is evident that the State Attorney's Office considers Witness 8 to be an important witness in its prosecution of George Zimmerman.
There are also new reports on the attempts to get information from Trayvon Martin's cell phone.
- On March 27, they got a court order for T-Mobile to provide call detail records and cell site location for Trayvon's phone. On March 28, they received call detail records, subscriber and billing information and historical location data for the phone for the period 1/1/12 to 3/1/12. The results were analyzed by Crime Intelligence Analyst Amanda Stephens. From earlier discovery, here is the page showing this is Trayvon's phone.
- On April 20, they got a search warrant for T-mobile to provide call detail records and location data for a phone. On May 3, T-Mobile responded it had none for the time period requested. This seems to me to also be for Trayvon's phone.
- On May 1, they got a court order for Google to provide them with the stored data in Trayvon Martin's Google account and password access to it. On May 14, they got a court order directing T-Mobile to reactivate voice and data service to the account. Affidavits were filed for both orders. No results were obtained from either company. Which seems to me to indicate they still don't have any stored text messages, photos or videos from Travyon's phone. See Diwataman for more on the difficulties with accessing data on Trayvon's phone.
The state obtained Dee Dee's telephone records from Simple Mobile, LLC on April 2, hours before her interview, via subpoena. Since it was a pre-paid phone, there was no name on the account or subscriber information. There were call detail records, which were provided in an Xcel spreadsheet for the requested period, Feb. 26 to April 2, and 9 pages of documentation.
George Zimmerman's phone records were initially obtained for the period Feb. 20 to Feb 28. On March 22, at FDLE's request, he signed a consent to search so they could access stored content (texts, photos) for the period March 7 to March 22.
As to the FBI reports, all of those asked during interviews whether Zimmerman expressed racially insensitive beliefs or comments, answered no, he did not.
Update 12/5/12: Mark O'Mara has now released his version of the FDLE reports. While the witness' name is still blacked out on his copy of August 2 and 3 reports and April 2 reports referenced above, he handwrote W-8 on them, so for certain these reports pertain to Dee Dee.
Still unknown: Whose phone records were the subject of the 4/20 search warrant to T-Mobile that yielded no results. I thought yesterday it was for stored data on Trayvon's phone, or the password for his phone, but it could also be for stored content on Dee Dee's phone. (They used a subpoena on April 2 to get her phone records and only got call detail records. A search warrant is needed for stored content like photos and the content of text messages.) While the warrant is to T-Mobile, and her account was with Simple Mobile, Simple Mobile partners with companies like T-Mobile and advises their customers their uploaded data may end up on these other companies' servers. See their privacy policy, and scroll down to Network Storage.
The report for the April 20 warrant says the request was for a specific blacked out number, and doesn't mention a name or a time period for the records it was seeking. In the discovery released to the defense in May, 2012, the state provided the victims cell phone records for 1/1 to 3/1/12 (p.7). In the June 14 discovery (p.3) they list a search warrant and return for telephone records, and separately, Tracy Martin's phone records for 1/1 to 3/1. So while there seems to be two requests for information from Trayvon's phone, both of which yielded results, there may have been three requests, one of which yielded nothing but a return saying there were no records to provide. While information from the SIM card was downloaded directly from the phone by the FDLE on March 26, it seems the state did not get whatever was stored in the phone or its internal memory device.
The April 20 search warrant could have been for either the password or means to access the stored information in Trayvon's phone (which yielded no results, so they turned to Google) or it could have been for stored content on Dee Dee's phone, which they believed might be on T-Mobile's servers instead of Simple Mobile's servers. If it was for Dee Dee's phone, it likewise came back empty.
In any event, in October, O'Mara filed a motion for subpoenas to T-Mobile, seeking records pertaining to any account in Trayvon's name from 1/1/12 to 6/1/12, and for any account in Dee Dee's name from 1/1/12 to the present. The Court issued two orders granting subpoenas on November 28, one of which O'Mara published and pertains to Trayvon's school records. The second could be for phone records or social media accounts, for either Trayvon or Dee Dee.
As to the state stalling discovery, it's a continuing problem in this case. According to O'Mara, the state has yet to turn over reports of the state's interviews with Dee Dee from August when she flew to Jacksonville to meet with prosecutors. There's no reason I can think of it should take this long.
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