A 33-year-old man’s bid for a new trial in a 2010 robbery-turned-murder that he says he didn’t commit will now rely on when a judge believes the incident actually happened.
Using cellphone data provided by the state, defense attorney Daniel Murphy argued Wednesday that Unjolee Moore wasn’t at the British Woods Apartments on June 28, 2010, when Bernard Hughes was fatally shot and Timothy Westfield was wounded. In fact, Murphy argued, the records showed Moore’s phone was about five and a half miles away from the scene around 11:30 p.m., when a victim of the crime told authorities that it began to occur.
But Chattanooga prosecutors, using the same data, framed the incident around a different time: 12:03 p.m., when police were called to the crime scene. And at that time, Executive Assistant District Attorney Cameron Williams argued, the data showed Moore’s phone interacting with a cell tower about a mile away from the crime scene.
Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Don Poole now has to decide that difference of opinion, and whether the cellphone tower evidence is enough to prove that Moore should receive a new proceeding because he received ineffective assistance at his first-degree murder and especially aggravated robbery trial in 2013.
“Whether it’s ineffective assistance, I have to look at all the proof,” Poole said at the end of Wednesday’s hearing. “And I will do that,” most likely in the form of a written opinion in the next few weeks.