Move To Exclude The State's Experts — No Notice Appears On The Docket

:::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

Two motions, and they are not the same motion. First, now: an order fixing a date certain for the State's Utah Code section 77-17-13 expert notice, and naming every examiner whose report the State intends to offer. Second, held for trial: a motion in limine excluding any expert never noticed, and excluding any laboratory report offered through a witness who did not write it.

Utah Code section 77-17-13 is short and it is mechanical. If either party intends to call an expert in a felony case, that party must give written notice to the other side as soon as practicable and not less than 30 days before trial, or 10 days before a hearing. The notice must carry the expert's name and qualifications, and either a copy of the expert's report or a written explanation of the proposed testimony, together with the results of any tests or other specialized data. When a party does not comply, the statute's remedy is a continuance or exclusion of the testimony.

Six laboratory reports sit on the State's own preliminary-hearing exhibit list, filed 6 May 2026: Exhibit 30, an ATF DNA report on the rifle and cartridges; Exhibit 31, an FBI DNA report on the towel and screwdriver; Exhibit 32, an ATF ballistics report; Exhibit 33, an ATF DNA report on the Dremel and cartridges; Exhibit 34, an ATF toolmarks report; and Exhibit 11, the Medical Examiner report, Bates 1682, disclosed 13 November 2025. The witness list attached to those exhibits names six people. Not one of them is a laboratory examiner. Every one is a police officer or an agent of the Utah State Bureau of Investigation.

The list itself carries a caveat that matters more than it looks. The State wrote that "neither the rules nor court order require the State to produce this list," that it was offered "as a professional courtesy," and that "as preparation continues, the State may add or remove witnesses." A courtesy list is not a notice. It creates no obligation, it fixes no deadline, and it can be amended without leave. That is exactly why an order fixing a date certain is worth asking for, and why a courtesy is not a substitute for one.

The numbering on that list is also unfinished business. It runs 1 through 16.4, jumps to 19, runs 20 through 25, then jumps again to 30 through 34. Exhibits 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29 are absent from the State's own list — withdrawn, renumbered, or held back, and the list does not say which. Meanwhile the certified Day 4 transcript records the prosecutor asking to publish "Exhibit 35," a number the 6 May 2026 list does not reach. None of that is improper; a list expressly subject to amendment is expected to move. It is, however, the reason a defense asks for the set to be closed and named rather than described.

A grep of all 867 rows of the reconstructed docket for the word "expert" returns exactly two hits, and both are defense notices — the 6 April 2026 amended notice for Dr. Christine Ruva and the 6 April 2026 notice for Dr. Bryan Edelman, both filed under section 77-17-13 for the cameras hearing. No State expert notice appears anywhere on the docket we have reconstructed. That may be because the reconstruction is incomplete. It may equally be because none was ever required yet, which is the honest reading and the one this page argues against itself with.

What The Defense Team Did Instead

On the public record the defense pressed this ground hard and early, and the archive shows it. The 30 September 2025 Formal Request for Discovery Pursuant to URCP 16 and Request for 404(b) Notice (docket 61) already demanded, at its items 24, 26, 28 and 30, the complete unredacted reports and files of any expert the prosecution intends to call at any hearing or trial, the underlying data and research the expert relied on, unredacted laboratory case files including any bench notes, the laboratory protocols, and any internal or external audit of the laboratory that ran the test. That request was served twenty days after the killing.

On 19 June 2026 the defense filed a Second Supplemental Request for Discovery asking, for every law-enforcement witness the State intended to call, the employment history, the training history, and expert notice if that witness would offer expert testimony. On 2 July 2026 the State filed a written refusal: "Preliminary hearings are expressly excluded from expert notice requirements by Utah Code Section 77-17-13(1)(a)." The State had taken the same position in April, telling the court that "expert notice requirements, including discovery of foundational materials, are expressly excluded from the preliminary hearing by the expert notice statute."

The defense also attacked the mechanism directly. Its 6 May 2026 motion in limine sought to bar the State from using Article I, section 12 of the Utah Constitution and Rule 1102 of the Utah Rules of Evidence to admit hearsay at the preliminary hearing at all. Judge Graf denied that motion on 22 June 2026, holding that the State may use reliable hearsay at a probable-cause determination. On 3 July 2026 the defense filed standing objections to the State's exhibits, and objection number 2 is precisely this instrument's second half: an objection to admission of the Medical Examiner report under Rule 1102(b)(5) without the testimony of the medical examiner.

Then, at the hearing itself, counsel did the work in the room. The certified Day 5 transcript records Mr. Burt telling the court that "the state presented DNA reports through a nonexpert," that the State "selectively read into the record a portion of those reports, which left an extremely misleading impression of the significance of that evidence," and that he had brought "the author of the report here." He then put the author, ATF DNA analyst Caitlin Oliver, on the stand and had her read paragraph F of her own Exhibit 30 — the overall conclusion, that there is "evidentiary support for the inclusion of Tyler Robinson ... as a possible contributor" — the paragraph the State's witness had not read.

The State's own valuation of that evidence is on the docket too, and it is unexpectedly low. On 1 May 2026 the State filed a Supplemental Notice re State's Evidence at Preliminary Hearing stating that if the court found its introduction of the DNA evidence warranted a continuance, the State was prepared "to proceed with the preliminary hearing as scheduled without the DNA evidence," having concluded that "the other evidence it intends to introduce is more than sufficient to establish probable cause for bindover." The State was willing to bind over with no DNA at all. That single filing tells the defense two things: the laboratory reports were never load-bearing at this stage, and every argument about them has been deferred to a trial phase whose calendar nobody has set.

One further item in the archive cuts against reading the record as a gap. On 27 October 2025 the State filed a Notice of State's Open File Policy, inviting defense counsel to review the prosecution file by appointment and to inspect all physical evidence in the custody of the evidence custodian. An open-file invitation is a real and substantial thing in a case of this size. It is not, though, a section 77-17-13 notice: it does not name an expert, it does not state an opinion, it does not attach a curriculum vitae, and it does not start a clock. The two instruments do different work, and one does not discharge the other.

What is not found in the material we hold is a separate filed motion asking the court to set a date certain for the State's section 77-17-13 notice, or a filed motion in limine pre-committing the exclusion remedy at trial. The 28 August 2026 defense status report says a motion to compel forensic discovery is being prepared with supporting expert declarations, and that counsel will ask for a briefing schedule at the 1 September 2026 hearing — so that step may be days away rather than absent. The filings in this case are gagged and partly sealed, the archive holds 374 PDFs against 867 known docket entries, and only 258 of those entries ever had a public PDF at all.

Where This Belongs In The Case

Stage of the case	When that stage runs	Status of this step
Rule 16 discovery request	From arraignment onward; served 30 Sept 2025	Made — expert files, bench notes, protocols and audits all demanded
Preliminary hearing	July 6-10, 2026 — completed	Statute expressly excludes this stage; State refused notice and the court allowed hearsay
Motion to compel a notice date	Available now; bind-over argument 1 Sept 2026	Forthcoming per the 28 Aug 2026 status report; no filed motion held
Trial motion in limine to exclude	After bind-over, 30 days before trial	Not yet due — no trial date exists

Witness Or Discovery Target

How it would be done	Target	Took the stand?	Status on the public record
Scheduling motion for a date certain	The State, through Deputy Utah County Attorney Ryan McBride	n/a	No filed motion in the archive we hold
Cross-examination on lab routing and who chose the analyses	Jennifer Faumuina, SBI crime-scene sergeant	Yes — 7 and 9 July 2026	Read paragraph D of Exhibit 30 aloud; certified Day 4 transcript
The author whose conclusion was not read	Caitlin Oliver, ATF DNA analyst	Yes — 10 July 2026, called by the defense	Read paragraph F on defense examination
The author of the toolmarks report	Samantha Karner, ATF firearm and toolmark examiner	Yes — 9 July 2026, called by the defense	Bench-notes file admitted over State objection
The FBI DNA examiner	Amanda Bakker, FBI laboratory	Yes — 7 July 2026, called by the defense	Day 2 is not certified; not citable as the record
Author of Exhibit 11, never noticed and never called	The Medical Examiner who signed the autopsy report	No	Report handled on Day 1; Day 1 is not certified
Exculpatory examiner whose result arrived as a read paragraph	Elisa Farmer, SBI fingerprint examiner	No	Her exclusion of the defendant entered by stipulation read aloud on Day 4
Records demand, no witness needed	The State's laboratory request and submission log	n/a	Not in the archive we hold

The Questions That Were Not Asked

Addressed to Sergeant Faumuina, whose Day 4 testimony is certified and searched:

Sergeant Faumuina, when you read paragraph D of Exhibit 30 aloud to this court, had you performed any part of the DNA analysis described in that report?
Did you select paragraph D, or was the paragraph chosen for you?
Were you shown paragraph F of the same report before you took the stand?
Do you hold any qualification that would let you tell this court what a likelihood ratio of one trillion does and does not mean?
Who at the Bureau decides which analyses a submitted item receives — the submitting agent, or the laboratory?
Is there a written laboratory submission form for each item you routed, and does it record the analysis requested?
The Medical Examiner documented seven bullet fragments. The ATF examiner received four. Who prepared the transfer paperwork between those two counts?

Addressed to Caitlin Oliver, the ATF DNA analyst who wrote Exhibit 30, whose Day 5 testimony is certified and searched:

Ms. Oliver, before 10 July 2026, had anyone from the State told you which paragraphs of your report would be read to this court?
Your laboratory reaches one of five conclusions — exclusion, limited support for exclusion, uninformative, limited support for inclusion, and support for inclusion. Which of the five did you reach for each sample in this case?
Your laboratory does not use a verbal scale because, in your words, verbal scales "add subjective words." Was the word chosen when your number was read aloud here your word?
Is there any conclusion in your report that a reader who saw only paragraph D would get wrong?

Addressed to Samantha Karner, the ATF firearm and toolmark examiner who wrote Exhibit 32, whose Day 4 testimony is certified and searched:

Ms. Karner, you were alerted a few months before testifying that the Medical Examiner had documented seven fragments and you had received four. Who alerted you?
Were you ever asked, by anyone, to determine whether the three missing fragments were lost in transit or never sent?
Your issued report states a conclusion. Your 47-page file states the reasoning. Was the short report the only document provided to the prosecutor before the hearing?

Addressed to the court at the scheduling conference, which is a demand rather than a cross:

The State's own exhibit list contains six laboratory reports and no laboratory witness. We ask the court to order the State to identify, by name and agency, every examiner whose report it intends to offer at trial.
We ask that the section 77-17-13 notice be served on a date certain fixed by this court, and not on the statutory floor of thirty days before a trial date that does not yet exist.

The rider we would attach to that motion, and to the subpoena duces tecum that follows it. For each examiner named, produce:

the examiner's current curriculum vitae and the date of the most recent competency and proficiency test, with the result;
the complete unredacted laboratory case file, including all bench notes, worksheets, and photographs, whether or not referenced in the issued report;
the instrument run logs and the raw electronic data files for every run associated with this case, in their native format;
every draft of the report, and the technical and administrative review records showing who changed what and when;
the laboratory submission form for each item, showing the analysis requested, by whom, and on what date;
the standard operating procedure in force on the date of examination, and every revision since;
any corrective-action record, non-conformance memorandum, or accreditation audit finding touching that discipline in the five years preceding the examination;
the written statement of the qualifications and limitations of the discipline that the issuing agency requires be attached to the conclusion;
the chain-of-custody record for every item, from seizure through each transfer between the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, the FBI laboratory and the ATF laboratory, with the weight or count recorded at each transfer;
any request for an analysis that was made and then declined, withdrawn, or left unscheduled, and the record of who decided.

That last item is not theoretical. On Day 4 the defense walked the ATF toolmarks examiner through the Department of Justice language on the qualifications and limitations of firearm and toolmark examinations — that a conclusion "is ultimately an examiner's decision and is not based on a statistically-derived or verified measurement," and that an examiner shall not assert a source identification is based on the uniqueness of an item. Counsel then offered the examiner's underlying 47-page bench-notes file, arguing that the issued report "expresses her ultimate conclusion but does not contain any of the reasoning for that conclusion." The State objected on relevance and Rule 403. The court overruled the objection and admitted the file. The bench notes are obtainable. The exchange proves it.

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This

The value here is not the exclusion. Exclusion of a State expert in a capital case is rare, and a court that can cure a late notice with a continuance will cure it with a continuance. The value is that the demand converts a laboratory conclusion from a sentence into a process the defense can inspect — and that a process the defense can inspect is a process a jury can be shown breaking.

This case has already produced the demonstration. Exhibit 30 reached the court through a witness who did not write it, reading one paragraph and not the next, and the sentence the court heard was "at least 1 trillion times more likely." The sentence the author actually wrote was "possible contributor." Nobody had to allege bad faith to make that point; the author read her own paragraph and the record corrected itself. Multiply that by six reports, and Route 2 — that the jury is being asked to convict on the output of a process it cannot inspect — writes itself without any alternative perpetrator.

The Medical Examiner is the sharpest instance. Exhibit 11 is the document that establishes the mechanism of death, and this site's cause-of-death record contests that mechanism directly. Its author has not testified in five days of hearing. The one discrepancy that surfaced — seven fragments documented by the Medical Examiner, four received by the ATF — was put to a toolmarks examiner who could only say she had been alerted to it "just a few months ago" and had not been asked to check whether anything was lost. That question has one competent witness, and a notice demand is the instrument that puts a name and a file behind them.

The fingerprint stipulation on Day 4 is the same shape and it runs the defendant's way, which is why it belongs here rather than in a complaint. The parties agreed, and the prosecutor read into the record, that SBI fingerprint examiner Elisa Farmer examined the latent prints and the palm print from the window near where the individual came off the Losee Center roof, found only three of comparable value, and excluded Tyler Robinson as the source of all three; subsequent FBI examinations of those same latents were inconclusive. That is an examiner's exculpatory conclusion, and it entered the case as a paragraph read aloud by a lawyer. Ms. Farmer was not noticed and did not testify. A stipulation is a legitimate and efficient way to handle an agreed fact — but the same mechanism that spares everyone a witness also means the court never heard why three prints were comparable and the rest were not, or what "inconclusive" meant at the second laboratory. A notice demand names the person who can answer both.

Grouping the six reports also has a cumulative effect no single motion produces. Two DNA laboratories worked this case, ATF and FBI, and the Day 5 testimony establishes that they do not report the same way — the ATF laboratory uses a five-conclusion framework and declines verbal qualifiers, while the defense examination put to the witness that FBI practice uses a verbal scale with words such as "strong." Two agencies describing the same kind of result in two vocabularies is not a scandal, but it is a jury question, and it only becomes one if both sets of examiners are named, noticed, and produced with the file that shows how each conclusion was reached.

There is also a defensive reason. Section 77-17-13 runs both ways. A defense that waits for the State's notice to land thirty days before trial inherits every reciprocal deadline at the same moment, in a case whose discovery corpus already runs to 29,237 files and a 12.1 terabyte drive. Fixing the schedule early is the only version of this fight the defense can win on the calendar.

This instrument serves Route 2 — the investigation itself. It needs no alternative perpetrator and it does not require the jury to accept anything about the mechanism of death. It requires only that the jury be shown how a laboratory conclusion travelled from the bench to the courtroom, and who was standing in the gaps. The sentence counsel says in closing is short: "Six laboratory reports. Not one of the people who wrote them was on the State's witness list. You were handed conclusions and never given the people who reached them."

There is a version of this that we would say at the podium on the morning of 1 September 2026, and it takes ninety seconds. The State has told this court twice that expert notice is a trial obligation. We accept that. We are not asking the court to move the statute. We are asking it to fix the date, because thirty days before trial is a floor written for an ordinary felony, and this record is 45 productions, 29,237 files and a 12.1 terabyte drive. Set the notice date when the court sets the trial date, and set it in the same order.

Day-one date: served 2025-09-17, the day after the Information, as part of our first Rule 16 packet, and renewed as a motion to compel on 2025-10-30. In September and October 2025 the perishable material was still perishable: laboratory information-management audit trails and draft-report versions sit inside retention schedules and get overwritten, raw capillary-electrophoresis data files are archived and rotated, and an examiner's memory of an unrecorded verbal request from a case agent is a wasting asset. By the time the toolmarks examiner learned of the fragment-count discrepancy — on her own account, only months before she testified in July 2026 — the contemporaneous transfer paperwork was already the sole route back to it.

The Honest Counterargument

The statute says the opposite of what this page wants, and it says it in the first line. Section 77-17-13 applies "at trial or any hearing, excluding a preliminary hearing held pursuant to Rule 7 of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure." The State did not evade the notice obligation at the preliminary hearing. There was no notice obligation at the preliminary hearing. When the defense asked for one anyway on 19 June 2026, the State declined in writing and cited subsection (1)(a), and it was right to.

The rest of the structure points the same way. Utah's Constitution, Article I, section 12, as amended in 1995, permits reliable hearsay at a preliminary examination. Rule 1102(b) makes "scientific, laboratory, or forensic reports and records" and "medical and autopsy reports and records" presumptively reliable as a matter of law. The defense mounted a full constitutional attack on that scheme — Fourth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments plus separation of powers — and lost on 22 June 2026, with the court holding that a relaxed application of those rights is appropriate at a probable-cause determination and that admissibility and evidentiary weight remain distinct. Under State v. Timmerman, that is settled Utah law, not an oversight.

So the absence of a State expert notice on the docket is, on the most likely reading, not a gap at all. Nothing was due. The State has until thirty days before trial, and this case has not been bound over, has no trial date, and had its bind-over argument set for 1 September 2026. A step that is not yet due has not been missed, and this page should not be read as saying it has.

The second half of the instrument is weaker than it reads, too, and it is worth saying so plainly. Section 77-17-13's remedy for a late or missing notice is "a continuance or exclusion." Courts reach for the first. A trial judge who can cure surprise by moving a date will move the date, and in a capital case with a client in custody a continuance is not a defense victory — it is the thing the defense has spent a year resisting. Filing an exclusion motion whose most likely outcome is a delay the client does not want is a real cost, not a rhetorical one.

There is a tactical cost as well. An early, detailed motion telling the State exactly which foundational materials the defense intends to attack is also a memorandum instructing the State on how to cure the defect before trial. Some capital lawyers deliberately let a thin notice stand, then meet it at trial with a Rule 702 challenge the State has had no opportunity to patch. Choosing not to file early is a strategy with a name, and it is not neglect.

What survives is narrower and it is a scheduling argument, not a scandal: in a capital case with 45 discovery productions and more than a million Discord communications, "thirty days before trial" is not a workable deadline for either side, and a court can be asked to improve on it. Counsel of record may already be asking. The 28 August 2026 status report says the motion is being drafted.

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​

What The Defense Team Did Instead​

Where This Belongs In The Case​

Witness Or Discovery Target​

The Questions That Were Not Asked​

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This​

The Honest Counterargument​

Sources On This Site​