Just going over some of the evidence in my mind. The recorded conversation between Donna and Charlie after the bump is extraordinary. On April 19th she tells Charlie that she's been approached by a man in the street who has handed her some disturbing paperwork. Charlie asks if its the IRS and she replies, "unfortunately, not now." He asks, "Does it involve me, or other people?" and she takes a long pause before saying " ... well, probably both of us. ... You've probably got a general idea of what I'm talking about." Holy frijoles! Then, in short order Charlie is meeting with KM at Dolce Vita and FBI agent Sanford says that, although the audio recording is poor, he was able to discern Charlie telling KM that if it isn't law enforcement, the person who approached his mom is probably going to need to be killed and if KM can't do it he'll get someone else !!!! Then, following this meeting, Charlie calls his mom and uses euphemisms saying he gave "a friend" some "relationship advice" and everything is being taken care of and not to worry. ... You'll recall that the judge found Sanford couldn't testify as to what is on the tape because he doesn't have specific expertise qualifying him to extract what was said from the admittedly poor recording. However, the judge also indicated such testimony could come in if appropriate foundation was laid. I'm surprised that apparently more wasn't done with the recording. Sanford testified that what he did was spend multiple hours listening to the recording over and over to eventually parse out what was being said. The judge found this wasn't enough foundation because anybody could listen to the tape over and over. We do forensic audio enhancement on occasion ourselves and it is much trickier than CSI and similar shows imply. It may be that there genuinely isn't enough information encoded to be able to enhance the conversation, but I would have expected, at a minimum, that they would have used notch or bypass filters to remove much of the dynamic noise present. My point is that if agent Sanford genuinely was able to make out those portions of the conversation the State should be able to produce a minimally enhanced version that does, in fact, make the conversation more legible. It is such an important piece of evidence I would have expected the State to have a true specialist in digital audio enhancement work with the recording.
