In a Williamson County capital murder case, defense attorney Ryan Deck has moved to request a hearing on potential misconduct committed by the county District Attorney, Jana Duty.
The attorney for the defendant is alleging that the DA had access to timestamps on a video which the defense was barred from seeing until about halfway through the trial. Round Rock criminal defense lawyer Ryan Deck maintains that the evidence was detrimental to his case and suspects that Duty acted inappropriately in doing so.
Deck believes Duty intentionally withheld the time stamped evidence from the defense and has filed a motion asking for a hearing to find out if this happened. If the judge agrees, the state may be thereafter kept from retrying Deck’s client for murder.
Adding to Deck’s case is a sworn affidavit from the former county DA investigator Royger Harris attesting to his witnessing Duty view the video before the trial, which Deck insists shows that the DA had access to the time-stamps.
While First Assistant DA Mark Brunner contests these allegations, saying the information was beneficial to the prosecution and thus would not have been withheld, Deck maintains there was no chance at a fair trial when the evidence was entered with the defense not having access to it. “Our defense was based on a timeline defense,” Deck argued, “a timeline of events, and I am not convinced those timestamps do benefit the state.”
The timestamps have a bearing on the case since police investigators cited the stamps in the written reports often. Although Harris left the DA office in December 2013, his affidavit is dated to March of the same year.
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