The former judge in the YNW Melly double murder case did not abuse his discretion when he threw out weeks of digital evidence obtained from a broad warrant, an appellate court ruled Wednesday.
The evidence — mostly messages extracted from Melly’s cellphone, email addresses and social-media accounts — will not be allowed in the rapper’s retrial after the Fourth District Court of Appeal’s ruling. In 2023, former Broward Circuit Court Judge John Murphy limited the digital evidence admitted into the retrial to the day of and following the murders.
“This temporal narrowing comported with the warrant’s stated purpose to locate Demons’s whereabouts to link him to the crimes,” the Fourth District Court of Appeal said in its opinion.
The evidence issue went up to the appellate court because prosecutors appealed Murphy’s ruling. The Broward State Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the ruling Thursday, citing the case being pending and scheduled for trial. It’s unclear if prosecutors plan to challenge the appeals court’s ruling…