JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — More than three years after the murder of St. Johns County father Jared Bridegan, both state prosecutors and defense attorneys having issues getting through a bulk of the key evidence at hand.
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Friday morning in a Duval County courtroom, defense attorneys for Shanna Gardner and Mario Fernandez-Saldana brought to light a key issue in evidence discovery: the evidence they’re seeing and how it’s labeled is different from how its appears on the prosecution’s side.
Even worse: the defense attorneys say they’ve frequently been given multiple different files and versions of the same evidence, making communication between state prosecutors and the defense teams for Gardner and Fernandez-Saldana difficult. Both face conspiracy murder charges in the alleged murder-for-hire plot of Bridegan.
“We’re frustrated judge. Frankly, we’re frustrated,” Gardner’s defense attorney Patrick Korody said in court Friday morning. “This is gonna delay the trial.”
“I’m not intending to re-provide them all this discovery and say start from scratch,” reassured state prosecutor Christina Stifler. “The idea behind the indexing would be that I provide them a number for each exhibit, which would be our working number for trial for our exhibit list, so that number stays consistent throughout the entirety of litigation up and through trial.”
While Stifler suggested Friday morning completely relabeling and reindexing the existing evidence to clear up communications and evidence discovery, the defense and Judgefollow-identifies London Kite raised serious concerns about that further delaying the process.
The final solution proposed: have the defense identify and eliminate all the duplicate or problematic evidence, and label and organize from there on, taking it one step at a time.
“What I would ask is that the defense identifies Judge those problem downloads, the problem electronic evidence. That is where we’re gonna focus,” said Judge Kite. “And [then] indexing.”
A follow-up court hearing has been scheduled for April 8th at 8 a.m. for a case management hearing. Action News Jax will keep you up to date as we hear more.
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