The appeal by Tesha Miller — the man convicted for engineering the 2008 murder of former chairman of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company Douglas Chambers — will be heard over three days beginning June 12 this year.

Miller, the alleged leader of a faction of the Spanish Town, St Catherine-based Klansman Gang, was convicted in the Home Circuit Court in December 2019 after a trial in which the prosecution led evidence from a sole witness who alleged that he was a former member of the gang led by Miller, and that it was Miller who ordered the hit and then arranged for the shooter to be sent to the Cayman Islands on a boat to evade the police.

Miller, who was charged with the offences of being an accessory before the fact and after the fact in relation to the killing, was sentenced in January 2020 to 38 years and nine months’ imprisonment at hard labour, while the sentence imposed on him for the offence of accessory after the fact was 18 months’ imprisonment at hard labour.

On Friday, the Court of Appeal, which on Wednesday began hearing an application from Miller’s defence team to adduce fresh evidence in the matter, said on June 12 it will go “straight into the hearing of the appeal” but that it would conduct a hearing with the defence and prosecution teams to give its ruling on the application to adduce fresh evidence before that date.

Lead attorney for Miller’s defence team, John Clarke, in a submission to the court regarding the fresh evidence application, said if it were refused it would place the tribunal “in peril” as it would be “looking at an incomplete account” given that there were crucial issues concerning the reliability and credibility of the sole material witness. Clarke further said, among other things, that the trial judge was biased towards the witness who had appeared before her in an unrelated matter and had been sentenced by her for that matter in 2018.

The prosecution, led by Director of Public Prosecutions Paula Llewellyn, in its submission, said “none of the material” served on the Crown by the defence had reached the threshold of what is required for fresh evidence to be adduced.

In an amended notice of application, which was filed on December 22, 2022, attorneys for Miller had requested the typewritten transcript of the original sentencing and resentencing for the Crown witness whose testimony helped to put him in prison. They further requested a written report from sentencing judge Justice Georgiana Fraser and a certified copy of her notes of the trial and also sought permission of the court to, among other things, adduce fresh evidence on appeal.

According to attorneys for Miller, the material requested, and other orders sought, are relevant to the issues determined in the appeal:

“If received, the reports, notes, audio, affidavits, and statements would inform the basis of the grounds filed and could serve a ‘useful purpose’ in assisting the parties and the court in narrowing issues demarcated in the application for leave to appeal the applicant’s conviction.”

They said that Miller and the fair hearing of his appeal “will be significantly prejudiced if this honourable court did not grant the orders sought”.

The Appeal Court, in ordering that the application be “granted in part”, had ordered that its registrar request, as a matter of urgency, from the Supreme Court, the typewritten transcript of the plea proceedings conducted in November 2019 for the Crown witness who testified against Miller, as well as the audio recording of Miller’s trial over that period. It, however, refused the application for the typewritten transcript of the original sentencing exercise for the Crown witness, the written report of the sentencing judge of her opinion on the case generally, as well as the certified copy of the whole of the notes taken in the trial by the trial judge.

The ruling on the application to adduce fresh evidence will be handed down on a date to be announced.