Juror In Buju Banton Trial May Have Handed Over Wrong Hard Drive [ Case update]

The United States District Court of Florida has agreed to review the Defendant's Exhibit introduced at a December 20, 2012 hearing for imprisoned international reggae artiste Buju Banton after his lawyers submitted documents hoping to prove that a juror tendered a different computer to investigators and not the one she used to carry out research related to the trial.

Terri Wright, the juror , had revealed in an interview that she researched the case during the trial.

An expert retained by attorneys representing Buju Banton found a trail of 1.6 million internet history records but none pertained to the time frame under scrutiny, February 14 to March 8, 2011.However, on Monday Buju's side renewed its attack, claiming Wright surrendered the wrong computer hard drive.

In documents filed on March 31 by Chokwe Lumumba, the attorney for the Grammy winning artiste , he contended that Wright did not comply with the court's order to provide the computer hard drive on which she did her internet research as she testified at the December 20, 2012 hearing.

The lawyers pointed to a March 26, 2013 Tampa Bay Times news article which quoted Wright's attorney Lori Palmieri as saying her client only had one computer. "It was a laptop and she brought it, end of story but not their story” said Palmieri.

But in a March 28, 2013 report, computer forensic expert Larry Daniel said he examined the hard drive provided by Wright according to the Court order.

“The hard drive delivered to me for forensic imaging was a full size hard drive from a desktop or tower computer,” he said.

According to the legal team it must be concluded from this conflict in facts that Wright did not produce her lone laptop computer hard drive and instead provided the Court with some other desktop hard drive.

The lawyers say this explains why the computer hard drive provided by Wright had no internet use during the time period in question.

Based on this, the prosecution was granted a motion to review the report from the computer forensic expert. Buju Banton whose given name is Mark Myrie was convicted of trying to set up a deal to buy 11 pounds of cocaine and sentenced to 10 years in prison.