Jamaica - Still no word on new ballistics machine

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Y2K discussion group : One Thread

Ballistics evidence played a major role in the just-concluded Braeton 7 trial, as the prosecution and defence teams tried to use it to show if bullets were fired from inside or outside the death house.

But even as evidence was trotted out for the trial, which ended with six cops cleared of murdering seven young boys in a St Catherine home in 2001, questions were again being raised about the government's failure to replace the island's only ballistics testing machine

The machine has been broken for the last four years and the National Security Ministry is still unable to say when they will be able to replace it.

. . .

That value has now been lost as the Drugfire machine fell victim to the Y2K bug. It had been repaired three times before, but by the time it crashed in 2001, the manufacturer - the US-based Mnemonic Systems Incorporated - was out of business. The Drugfire machine was once popular with the US-based Federal Bureau of Investigation, which relied on it for collecting evidence from firearms, bullets and bullet fragments. However, in 1998, after the FBI agreed to join the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the use of the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), the manufacturers of the Drugfire machine closed shop.

The machine that the Jamaican police had used for years, before it crashed, now lies rotting at the ballistics department in Kingston.

Jamaica Observer

-- Anonymous, February 13, 2005


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