The recordkeeping practices are alarming. There’s no grand digital inventory of the surveillance footage that was submitted. No hard drive of all pertinent video footage received. It’s kept loose on random thumb drives taped to pieces of paper. No wonder some is “missing”.
The State claims nothing is missing. How does the Defense know that a specific bit of film is "missing"? (These are usually issues that go to the Judge's chamber as trial is starting or after it starts - when both sides submit the list of actual evidence they intend to use, which hasn't happened yet).
Someone or some persons actually parsed and divided and labeled the evidence submission. It's often done by hand (a bit odd to tape things to pieces of paper, but same effect as using an envelope). If the thumb drive disappears from its label, the label would be easy to refer to, to ask for a replacement.
The only way, in court, that someone can get something that's "missing" is to prove it existed in the first place - which Judge Judge keeps asking the Defense to do. The Defense wants to say that there's just so much evidence to go over that they are overwhelmed and can't find any particular piece.
Traditionally, each side waits until the other side draws forth a piece of evidence to present at trial (say 70 surveillance tapes, labeled as 70 pieces of evidence).
Then the other side goes and looks to see if they have it (they ought to have devised their own system by then). I would think that reviewing all videos (easily parsed out of thumb drives by looking at the file extensions) would be a priority for the Defense. Indeed, I'm guessing that AT knows full well what those videos show (and she isn't attacking them as evidence and instead is pretty silent about that). The only things she seems to think are missing are in the hands of the FBI and/or the IGG company used by LD.
Will Judge Judge give Defense more time to organize and perhaps figure out (using the parallel discovery filed with the Court - organized in the same manner, no doubt) what is missing? If he thinks the Defense lost the submission, he won't give them a lot of time (he almost has to give them some time though).
The reason AT keeps bringing up the disparity between when the State mentioned the existence of footage (for example) and when she received it...is that she justifiably believes that her office should have the same amount of time as the State to review matters.
I don't think we'll see a trial even by mid-2025. The surveillance video alone (some of which perhaps as yet unseen by AT and team) is massive. Judge Judge may order the State to make yet another copy - and this time segregate just that footage. Who knows? If that happens, though, AT will then want the clock for perusal to be set for a year from now - as that's how long she's claiming the State had, at least.
State has repeatedly stated that it already gave this to the Defense. At some point, Judge Judge will require a witness to the manual transfer of evidence (if this keeps happening) and will then begin to sanction the Defense for being disorganized. But I don't think that's what AT is after - she wants something that the State will continue to claim it doesn't have (because it doesn't have it).
IMO.
There is no legal requirement to submit discovery on a hard drive, btw. Maybe Judge Judge will order that next - we shall see. Then, the thumb drives will be loaded onto hard drives. Just more work, and I'm not sure what the purpose would be (now the hard drives would have to have some external labels representing many many files - whereas the thumb drives are more like file folders, many lawyers prefer thumb drives for that reason - easier for the lawyer to search and quote).
