Trial Judge Chester Stamp on Tuesday said that he has a short distance to go in completing his summation in the Everton “Beachy Stout” McDonald and Oscar Barnes murder trial in the Home Circuit Court in Kingston.

Stamp began his summation last week.

McDonald and Barnes are being tried for the July 20, 2020 murder of McDonald’s second wife, Tonia McDonald. She was killed on the main road in Sherwood Forest, Portland.

On Tuesday, Justice Stamp gave the seven-member jury an indication that the fate of both accused men could officially be placed in their hands by today.

Stamp spent most of his summation again focusing on controversial call recordings purported to be of conversations between McDonald and Denvalyn “Bubbla” Minott, the confessed contractor in the murder who is serving a 19-year prison sentence for the crime.

The call recordings which implicate McDonald in a plot to murder his wife were said to have been captured by Minott.

Minott, during his testimony in the trial, which started in September 2023, had told the court that McDonald contracted him for $3 million to kill his wife, but claimed that he took the job and sub-contracted it to Barnes.

However, Barnes has maintained his innocence, claiming that he knows neither McDonald nor Minott.

According to Minott, after he could not get the promised bounty from McDonald he started to record calls with him. However, the recordings played in court had dates before the murder was committed.

Minott had also said at first that he used a Samsung A31 cellular phone to record the calls. On another occasion he told the seven-member jury that he used at least four different phones to record the calls but the recordings were saved on the same memory card.

“Minott said he got the Samsung A31 in June, 2020. He could not have gotten it in June. He came back and said he made the recordings with three or four different phones. The audio files do not corroborate Minott’s evidence because it is not from an independent source. If you cannot be sure that the recordings are authentic, you must disregard it,” Stamp told the jury.

McDonald is represented by attorneys Earl Hamilton, Christopher Townsend, Courtney Rowe, Ryan Jon-Paul Hamilton, and John Jacobs.

The attorneys representing Barnes are Earnest Davis and Vincent Wellesley.

Prosecutors in the case are Luke Cook and Sophia Rowe.

The trial continues today.