Demand The State's Own Exhibits — And The Six Numbers Missing From Its List

:::caution Legal Disclaimer Tyler Robinson is charged, not convicted, and is presumed innocent. Nothing on this page states as fact that any living person committed a crime, destroyed evidence, or acted improperly. Court filings in this case are subject to a gag order and sealing, so the public record is incomplete by design. :::

The One Thing We Would Do Differently

Move to compel production of every preliminary-hearing exhibit in its native, Bates-numbered form, together with the clerk's list of what was actually received — and put on the record, in one sentence, what happened to exhibit numbers 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29.

The State published a witness and exhibit list on 6 May 2026. It carries the State's own Bates numbers: the Medical Examiner report at Bates 1682, the ATF ballistics report at Bates 11543, the ATF toolmarks report at Bates 17741, the photograph of the burnt note at Bates 14613. Those numbers are the State's internal address for each document.

The public holds none of those documents. What the public holds instead is 59 PNG screenshots of exhibits as they appeared on the courtroom feed across the four days of the preliminary hearing that were photographed — eight from Day 1, eighteen from Day 2, one from Day 3, thirty-two from Day 4. A screenshot of a projected exhibit is not the exhibit. It has no Bates stamp, no page count, no production date, no chain of custody, and no way to show whether the page displayed was page one of two or page one of forty.

There is a second thing wrong with the list, and it is arithmetic. The exhibits run 1 through 16.4, then jump straight to 19, run 20 through 25, then jump again to 30 and finish at 34. Exhibits 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29 do not appear on the State's own sequential list. The same six gaps appear in the earlier 3 April 2026 version of the list that the State attached to the filing. Six absent numbers in a party's own numbering, surviving a month and a redraft, is a specific and entirely checkable thing for a defense to ask about. It is one sentence to ask and it cannot be answered vaguely.

We ask it as a question, not an accusation. Withdrawn, renumbered, reserved and never used, or held back — we do not know which, and that is precisely why counsel asks.

The relief, as it would be written

This is the operative paragraph, not a description of one. It is short because a court grants short things.

Defendant moves the Court for an order requiring the State, within fourteen days, to:

(1) Produce to the defense, and lodge with the Court, a native-format copy of each exhibit offered at the preliminary hearing on 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 July 2026 — including every sub-lettered and sub-numbered part — in the file format in which the State maintains it, without conversion to image, and with each page bearing the Bates number under which it was produced in discovery;

(2) Produce a load file listing, for each such exhibit: the exhibit number as marked in court, the Bates range, the total page or duration count, the date of first disclosure to the defense, the producing agency, and the custodian of the original;

(3) Produce or stipulate to the release of the clerk's exhibit list for each of the five hearing days, recording every exhibit marked, offered, received, refused, withdrawn, or taken under advisement;

(4) State on the record whether exhibit numbers 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29 were at any time assigned to an item, and if so, identify each item and the date the assignment was withdrawn; and

(5) File an amended exhibit list conforming to the exhibits actually received, including exhibits 5.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4 and 35, none of which appears on the list filed 6 May 2026.

Ground: Utah R. Crim. P. 16; Utah R. Evid. 106 and 1006; the Court's inherent authority over its own record; and the heightened reliability required in a capital proceeding under the Eighth Amendment.

Requests (3), (4) and (5) cost the State an afternoon. Request (1) costs it an export. There is no version of this motion that is expensive to grant, and that is deliberate — a motion a court can grant without a hearing is a motion that produces an answer.

What The Defense Team Did Instead

The public record shows the defense fighting this ground hard and early. On 3 July 2026 — three days before the hearing opened — counsel filed Defendant's Standing Objections to the State's Preliminary Hearing Exhibits, a five-page constitutional challenge to the use of Utah Rule of Evidence 1102 and Utah Const. art. I, § 12 to authenticate exhibits through witnesses without personal knowledge. It objects specifically to the Medical Examiner report coming in under Rule 1102(b)(5) with no medical examiner on the stand, to officer-to-officer hearsay under 1102(b)(6), and to written statements from declarants who will not testify. That last objection names exhibits 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 12.3, 13, 14 and 16.

The certified Day 4 transcript shows the Court honouring that filing exhibit by exhibit — "noting the standing objections by defense" before nearly every admission. On Day 4 the defense also called its own witnesses and put its own documents in: Karner 6 (the examiner's case file), Karner 11 (the DOJ uniform language for firearms testimony), Karner 27 (the AFTE Theory of Identification), and on Day 5 Oliver 157 — a third ATF DNA report dated 11 December 2025 that the State had never marked at all.

What has not appeared in any filing in the archive we hold is a motion directed at the form and completeness of production itself: native files, Bates numbers travelling with the file, a load file of metadata, and the clerk's received-exhibit list as a public document. The 28 August 2026 defense discovery status report makes the practical problem plain in the defense's own words — "none of the original filenames include the Bates number" — and describes the defense team doing its own Bates stamping across 45 productions and 29,237 files.

That absence is a fact about the public record, and it is the whole of what we assert. The filings are gagged and partly sealed, and the archive we hold contains 374 PDFs against 867 known docket entries, only 258 of which ever had a public PDF.

Where This Belongs In The Case

Stage of the case	When that stage runs	Status of this step
Rule 16 discovery — production-format protocol	From arraignment onward; available since Sept 2025	Not visible on the public record
Preliminary hearing — exhibit admission	July 6–10, 2026 — completed	Standing objections filed 7-3-26; production form not raised in the material we hold
Bind-over argument on the exhibit record	1 September 2026, 10:00 a.m. MDT	Happening the day this page was written
Motion in limine / trial exhibit list	After bind-over, before trial	Not yet due — and a step not yet due has not been missed

Witness Or Discovery Target

How it would be done	Target	Took the stand?	Status on the public record
Motion to compel native, Bates-numbered production of Exhibits 1–35 and all sub-lettered parts	State of Utah, through Deputy County Attorney Ryan McBride, who signed the 5-6-26 list	n/a — records demand	No such motion in the archive we hold
Request for the clerk's Exhibit List form for preliminary-hearing Days 1–5	Court clerk, Fourth Judicial District	n/a — court record	A clerk's Exhibit List form was filed in this case for the 3 Feb 2026 hearing; no preliminary-hearing equivalent is in the archive we hold
One question on the record accounting for exhibits 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29	Chad E. Grunander, who confirmed the exhibit roll at the close of the State's case	Yes — argued 9 July 2026	Asked and answered. See the certified passage quoted below
Cross on Rule 1102 written statements 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 13, 14	The five absent declarants — A. Wright, T. Phillips, a TPUSA representative, C. Noble, Mike Mitchell	No — none appeared	Objected to in writing 7-3-26; declarants never crossed
Demand for the operative exhibit list actually used at the hearing	State of Utah	n/a — records demand	The list the public holds is not the list the hearing ran on. See below

The list the public holds is not the list the hearing ran on. Exhibits 5.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4 and 35 were all offered and received during the preliminary hearing. None of the six appears anywhere on the 6 May 2026 list. Exhibit 35, in particular, sits above the top of the published list entirely — it was published on Day 1 and again through Sgt. Faumuina on Day 4 as an image of the wooded area northeast of the Losee Center. No public document lists what the Court actually received.

The five sworn statements nobody has read

Utah Rule of Evidence 1102 lets a magistrate receive reliable hearsay at a preliminary hearing. In practice that means a piece of paper stands in for a human being, and the declarant is not there to be crossed. Five such statements are named on the State's list. Not one has ever been public, and not one of the five people was called.

Ex.	Rule 1102 written statement	Bates No. on the list	Date disclosed	Public?	Declarant took the stand?
6.1	Written statement of A. Wright	none given	none given	No	No
7.1	Written statement of T. Phillips	none given	none given	No	No
8.1	Written statement from TPUSA	none given	none given	No	No
13	Written statement of C. Noble	none given	none given	No	No
14	Written statement of Mike Mitchell	20853; 51	4/1/2026; 10/24/2025	No	No
16	Recorded 1102 statement of Lance Twiggs	23148	4/28/2026	Played in court, redacted	No — appeared only on video

Four of the six rows carry no Bates number and no disclosure date at all on the State's own filing. The State's 3 April 2026 cover letter explains why: "We are currently working to gather written 1102 statements to authenticate exhibits (especially exhibits 6 – 9)… We will number and provide 1102 statements as we get them." They were being collected while the exhibit list was being written. Whether they were ever numbered is a question the load file in request (2) answers on one line.

Exhibit 8.1 deserves its own sentence. A written statement from an organisation — TPUSA — is not a statement by a person with personal knowledge of anything. Somebody signed it. Rule 1102 presumes a declarant, and the first question at trial is who that declarant was and what they personally saw.

The Questions That Were Not Asked

Addressed to the prosecutor who signed the 6 May 2026 list, on the record, at the first pretrial conference after bind-over. Each is short on purpose. Each produces an answer or a refusal, and a refusal is also an answer.

Mr. McBride, your 6 May 2026 list runs from exhibit 1 to exhibit 34. Were exhibit numbers 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29 ever assigned to a document, a photograph, or a recording at any point?
If any of those six numbers was assigned and then dropped, what was the item, and on what date was it dropped?
Exhibit 35 was received in evidence on Day 1 and published again on Day 4. Why does it appear on neither the 3 April letter nor the 6 May filing?
Exhibits 5.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 and 12.4 were received. On what date was each of them first disclosed to the defense, and under what Bates number?
Is there a single document in existence — the clerk's exhibit log — that lists every exhibit received across the five days of the preliminary hearing? Will the State stipulate to its release?
The 6 May list gives no Bates number and no disclosure date for the written statements at 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, and 13. Do those four items carry Bates numbers today?
Exhibit 33 is listed as disclosed "1/21/2025" — eight months before Charlie Kirk died. The April version of the same line says 1/21/2026. Which is correct, and does the error appear anywhere in the State's production index?
Your filing states the hearing was "scheduled for May 18, 2022." Is the exhibit list the public holds the final version, or a draft?
When the State produces a report to the defense through Axon, does the Bates number travel in the filename?
Ms. Karner, on Day 4 defense counsel told the Court he could not locate a page of your ATF protocol because, in his words, "I don't have the Bates on it." In your laboratory's own practice, does every page of a produced case file carry a unique identifier on its face?
Sgt. Faumuina, when you sent an item to a laboratory, did the submission form carry the Bates number the item would later be produced under, or a different tracking number?
Ms. Oliver, your third report — dated 11 December 2025 and marked in court as Oliver 157 — was put into evidence by the defense, not the State. Was that report produced to the State before the hearing?

The tenth question is not a criticism of anyone. It is a certified illustration of the problem this motion solves. On Day 4, cross-examining the ATF examiner, defense counsel said on the record: "Let's go to Exhibit 12 and go to Theory of Identification and Range of Conclusions, page 1 of 3. I don't have the Bates on it. Toward the end. It's Document FT10. No. That's not it." He then asked leave to approach and handed the witness a hard copy. That is what happens in a courtroom when a document exists but is not addressable by number, and it happens to experienced capital counsel with a fully staffed team. It is a workflow defect in the production, not in the lawyer.

The answer the record already gives — and it is a real one

We publish the result that cuts against this page as prominently as the result that supports it. The six-number question was asked, and it was answered, on the certified record. At the close of the State's case on 9 July 2026, Judge Graf read the exhibit roll aloud and the exchange runs:

THE COURT: … 13, 14, 15, 16, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4. 17 and 18 are blank, so no.

MR. GRUNANDER: That is correct. We're not offering 17 and 18.

THE COURT: All right. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. The following are blank: 26, 27, 28, 29.

MR. GRUNANDER: That's accurate. We're not offering on those numbers.

That is verification tier T1 — the certified Day 4 transcript, searched. It settles that the six numbers were not concealed from the Court. What it does not settle is the question underneath: "blank" describes the court's exhibit log, not the State's file. It does not say whether an item was ever assigned one of those numbers and later pulled, or whether the numbers were reserved in a draft and never filled. Questions 1 and 2 above survive the answer. They are now smaller questions, and we say so.

Three numbering systems, one screenshot

There is a trap in this record that a Bates audit exists to catch, and the certified transcript proves it. State's Exhibit 18 is blank. Yet on Day 4 a witness read aloud from a report: "Exhibit 18 consists of five .30-06 Springfield…" and "The Exhibit 18A cartridge case was examined…" Those are the ATF laboratory's own internal item numbers inside its report, not court exhibit numbers. A third set runs alongside both: the defense exhibits, marked Karner 6, Karner 11, Karner 27, Bakker 4, Bakker 7, Bakker 34, Bakker 35, Oliver 157.

So three independent numbering systems were live in that courtroom at once, two of them reusing the same small integers. A PNG screenshot captioned "exhibit 34" tells a reader nothing about which of the three it belongs to. A Bates-numbered native document tells them immediately. That is the whole argument for this motion in a single example.

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This

A capital defense needs the exhibit set to be a closed, addressable, checkable list. Every later motion depends on it. A Rule 702 challenge to the toolmarks report needs the report, not a photograph of a page of it. A completeness objection under Rule 106 needs to know how many pages the exhibit had. A Brady argument needs to know that exhibit 33's disclosure date is 21 January 2026 and not 21 January 2025. None of that can be built on a screenshot.

Day-one date: 2025-09-15. Our attorney serves the production-format demand with the first Rule 16 request — native files, Bates number carried in the filename, and a load file of metadata for every production. In September 2025 the State had produced nothing; the first Axon production landed in October and the forty-fifth on 18 August 2026. A format protocol agreed before production one costs the producing party almost nothing. Retrofitting it across 29,237 files and a 12.1-terabyte drive costs a defense team months, which is exactly what the 28 August 2026 status report describes it doing. That window closed the day the first production went out unstamped, and it cannot be reopened. The exhibit-specific rider — the clerk's list and the six-number accounting — goes out 2026-05-07, the day after the State's list is filed.

A sworn written statement offered in place of a live witness is the single easiest thing in this case to attack, and the reason is not subtle: the declarant is not in the room. No one can put to A. Wright what was visible from where that witness stood. No one can put to T. Phillips whether the account describes what the witness saw live or what the witness later watched back on a phone. No one can put to exhibit 8.1 who at TPUSA wrote it and what that person personally witnessed. A piece of paper cannot be impeached by an omission from its own text, cannot be shown a photograph and asked whether it changes the answer, and cannot be asked the one question that beats "are you sure?" — "were you asked to look?" Rule 1102 makes those statements presumptively admissible at a preliminary hearing; it does nothing for them at trial, where the Confrontation Clause applies with full force. Every one of the five is therefore a witness the State must either produce or abandon, and counsel wants the documents in hand — with Bates numbers, with dates, with signatures — long before that choice is forced.

This is also the rare demand a court finds easy to grant. It touches no classified holding, asks no federal agency to waive anything, seeks nothing the State does not already possess, and imposes no new work beyond an export. A judge who would never order an intelligence service to answer a subpoena will order a party to produce its own exhibit in the format it already keeps it in. And every answer helps: the State either produces, or it says on the record why it will not, and the reason becomes the finding.

The route this serves is Route 2 — the investigation itself. It needs no alternative perpetrator. The sentence counsel says in closing is:

"The State asked you to convict on thirty-four exhibits. It could not tell the Court, without being prompted, what happened to six of its own numbers, it admitted six more that appear on no list you have ever seen, and not one page of any of it was ever produced to the public in the form the State keeps it in. You are being asked to trust a list you were never allowed to check."

The Honest Counterargument

The strongest answer is that the parties agreed to this, and the judge approved it. In the ruling of 1 June 2026 the Court records that at oral argument on 19 May 2026, "the parties agreed that neither the public nor the media should be permitted to inspect or copy exhibits presented at the preliminary hearing except as published in court as part of the hearing." Both sides. The defense asked for more restriction, not less — it moved to close portions of the hearing and seal the exhibits outright, on the ground that pre-trial publicity in this case threatens an impartial jury. The reason the public holds screenshots rather than documents is a considered, litigated, bilateral decision made in the defendant's own interest, and this page's complaint about it is in real tension with the client's own position.

The second answer is that the exhibit numbering is unremarkable. Lawyers reserve blocks of numbers in draft exhibit lists all the time and then do not use them — the 3 April letter says in a footnote that "the exhibits may be renumbered before the hearing", and it plainly happened: the April version's exhibit 13 was a doorbell video, and by 6 May exhibit 13 was a written statement. Gaps of that kind are housekeeping, not concealment, and the Day 4 roll call is exactly what a routine gap looks like when a judge reads it aloud.

The third is that our instrument may already exist and be invisible. Everything the State produced is in the defense's hands under Bates numbers — the status report proves counsel is indexing it file by file. A motion about production form may have been made in a letter, resolved by stipulation, or filed among the 119 substantive docket entries that have no public PDF. Silence in the public record is not evidence of a failure.

What survives all three is narrow, and it is what this page actually asks for: the clerk's list of exhibits received across all five days should be a public document. No fair-trial interest is harmed by a list of numbers and one-line descriptions. It is the cheapest transparency measure available in this case, and its absence is the reason a member of the public still cannot say, with confidence, what evidence the Court relied on to send Tyler Robinson to trial.

Sources On This Site

:::danger Theoretical Exercise Only This page is a theoretical exercise. It is a written simulation of how an idealised defense attorney might approach this case. We make no claim that there is any problem with the current defense attorney, with any member of the defense team, or with any decision they have made.

Real capital defense is conducted under a gag order, with sealed filings, and on the basis of full discovery that the public has never seen. Counsel of record know facts we do not. A step described here as "not on the public record" may already have been taken privately, may have been considered and rejected for good reason, or may not yet be due at this stage of the case. Silence in the public record is not evidence of a failure.

Nothing here is legal advice, a criticism of any licensed attorney, or an allegation of professional misconduct. :::

This website's author is @HolonCitizen on X and YouTube/@HolonCitizen. Follow me there.

The One Thing We Would Do Differently​

The relief, as it would be written​

What The Defense Team Did Instead​

Where This Belongs In The Case​

Witness Or Discovery Target​

The five sworn statements nobody has read​

The Questions That Were Not Asked​

The answer the record already gives — and it is a real one​

Three numbering systems, one screenshot​

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This​

The Honest Counterargument​

Sources On This Site​