On Tuesday, Montgomery attorney Julian McPhillips filed yet another motion in Dallas County Circuit Court in relation to the ongoing case against three officers in the Selma Police Department (SPD) who were indicted on charges of making false statements in regard to a matter under investigation by the Alabama Attorney General’s office last November.

On Nov. 9, McPhillips requested a slew of documents relevant to the case and, about a month later, was provided a hard drive with more than 30,000 documents on it, nearly 10,000 of which are “forensic data files” that cannot be “readily opened” or “can only be expensively opened, copied or reproduced,” according to the motion.

After describing the difficulty to the state, the state’s attorney, Andrew Arrington, met with the defendants and counsel to get a better idea of what documents were difficult to access.

On Feb. 4, Arrington informed the defendants’ counsel of various methods that could be employed to open the files in question but added that doing so “may limit the files that are visible” and recommended that the defendants’ counsel “retain the services of a qualified forensics examiner.”

“What is the world coming to?” McPhillips asked. “It’s just one more outrage ‘the persecutors posing as prosecutors’ are perpetrating on our innocent clients, some of Selma’s finest police officers who need to be out on the street fighting crime, not fighting back-stabbing innuendos from the office of the highest law enforcement officer of Alabama.”

McPhillips’ latest motion requests that the state pay for the cost of hiring a forensics examiner, noting that the defendants have been on unpaid leave since November and thus are without the capability of hiring one themselves.

Further, the motion states, rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals have ruled that defendants are entitled to the cost of an expert witness when they can “show the trial court that there exists a reasonable probability both that an expert witness would be of assistance to the defense and that denial of expert assistance would result in a fundamentally unfair trial.”

“As these documents are copies of the defendants’ computer files while employed at the Selma Police Department during the state’s investigation, there exists a reasonable probability that this expert will be of assistance in each defendant’s defense and that denial of this expert assistance will result in a fundamentally unfair trial,” the motion states.