Score Card — The Ideal Defense Attorney
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.
What A Score Card Is
A score card is how this site hands a judgment back to you. It gives you an area, tells you what is known about it, and asks you to decide whether you think there is a problem. It does not decide for you, and it does not keep your answer.
This one is the legal courtroom score card. It simulates an ideal defense attorney and asks a single question, thirty-seven times:
Would an ideal defense attorney have done this differently — and if so, is that a problem, or not?
Before You Score Anything
Three facts change most people's scoring, so they come first.
1. The case has not been bound over. Preliminary hearing testimony closed on July 10, 2026 and bind-over oral argument is set for September 1, 2026. Roughly half the rows below concern steps that are not yet due. Scoring those as failures is scoring a runner for not having finished a race that is still on lap two.
2. The record is sealed and gagged. A broad gag order has been in force since December 2025, forensic material is under seal, and defense expert work is confidential by rule. A step you cannot see may have been taken months ago.
3. The defense is winning real ground. The ATF comparison came back inconclusive — and it is in the record because the defense called the examiner. The defense also filed a detailed motion to stop further testing of the bullet jacket fragment and to let its own expert examine it first. That is a defense doing serious work on the right evidence.
The Score Card
For each row, mark your own judgment in the last column. Suggested marks:
- P — a problem. This should have been done and its absence matters.
- N — not a problem. Timing, strategy or the sealed record explains it.
- ? — cannot tell from outside. Expect to use this one a lot.
| # | Area | The question | Your call |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Explosive Residue Testing | Compel GC-MS / IMS residue testing on every retained item, and force production of the list of tests the government actually ordered. | |
| 2 | Soil Excavation Subpoena | Force production of the excavation work order, the hauling manifest, and the landfill destination for the soil taken from under the tent. | |
| 3 | Security Team Clothing | Demand evidence numbers, storage location and test results for the clothing taken from the protective detail — and the hospital scrubs that replaced it. | |
| 4 | Transport SUV Custody | Get the evidence log for the Yukon: when it was seized, when released, to whom, what was swabbed, and what the burnt object in it was. | |
| 5 | Independent Autopsy Review | Get a defense pathologist onto the wound morphology, and put the medical examiner on the stand instead of letting a case agent read her report. | |
| 6 | Microphone Hardware | Demand the physical microphone and transmitter, its serial number, its procurement chain and the AV crew's custody of it. | |
| 7 | Blast & Acoustics Experts | Notice two experts nobody has: an explosives and shaped-charge specialist, and an acoustician on the recorded sound and its direction. | |
| 8 | Scene Alteration & Spoliation | Ask the court for sanctions and an adverse-inference instruction because the scene was destroyed before the defense existed. | |
| 9 | FBI Agents On The Stand | One FBI witness testified in five days, and she was a lab examiner. Subpoena the agents who actually directed the scene. | |
| 10 | Bomb Dogs & EOD Sweep | Get the canine and EOD records: was there a pre-event sweep, a post-event sweep, and what did either find? | |
| 11 | Hospital & Transport Record | Get the trauma record, the intake documentation and the footage: the only account of the wound written by people with no stake in the case. | |
| 12 | Alternative-Perpetrator Notice | The gateway motion. Without a noticed third-party defense, every intelligence subpoena downstream of it is irrelevant and gets quashed. | |
| 13 | NCTC Halted Inquiry | The strongest on-record intelligence thread in the case: a named official saying his foreign-nexus inquiry was halted. Subpoena him. | |
| 14 | TPUSA Subpoenas | The event was run by a private organization. Its contracts, security decisions and AV vendor records are reachable without fighting any agency. | |
| 15 | Family & Inner-Circle Witnesses | The question people ask most, answered honestly: what a court would actually allow, and why an AI defense attorney would still not do it. | |
| 16 | Fort Huachuca Records | Ask for the documents — visitor logs, flight manifests, scheduling — and name nobody. | |
| 17 | Ballistics Rule 702 Challenge | Get ahead of the sealed report: challenge admissibility before any lead-comparison result arrives, not after. | |
| 18 | Confession Suppression | If he was in custody with his phone seized at 6:25 PM, who typed at 7:57 PM? Move to suppress and to compel the custody record. | |
| 19 | Independent Device Re-Examination | Do not accept the government's extraction report. Re-extract from the original forensic images with a defense examiner. | |
| 20 | Brady Enforcement | Stop renewing requests that go unanswered. Move for sanctions, exclusion, or dismissal, and make the court own the delay. | |
| 21 | Gag Order & Publicity | The defense called the ATF result exculpatory and then moved to seal it. Ask whether secrecy still helps this defendant. | |
| 22 | FARO Point-Cloud Expert | 660 GB of raw 3D laser-scan data of the scene reached the defense in July 2026. Retain the expert who can measure trajectory geometry and surface damage from it. | |
| 23 | Dispatch & CAD Records | Get the machine-generated, timestamped record of what the investigation was actually doing in the first hours. | |
| 24 | Detention & Release Records | And the arrival-order record — who was already at the address when local police got there. Records only; nobody named. | |
| 25 | AV Procurement Chain | Purchase order to delivery signature, with serial numbers. Ordinary subpoenas to private vendors, fighting no agency. | |
| 26 | Cell-Site & Tower-Dump Discovery | At least 25,253 CSLI records sit in discovery. Somebody chose which subset to read, and that decision is discoverable. | |
| 27 | Foreign-Carrier Records & MLAT | Written knowing a court would likely refuse it — then showing the question is answerable from material the State already holds. | |
| 28 | Crime-Scene Warrant Gap | Twenty-five public warrants and not one names the UVU campus. Move to suppress, or make the State say on the record that there is none. | |
| 29 | State Expert-Notice Exclusion | No State expert notice appears anywhere on an 867-row docket, and every examiner who testified in five days was called by the defense. | |
| 30 | Exhibit Production & Bates Audit | The State published Bates numbers for 34 exhibits and the public holds none. Its own list skips 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 and 29. | |
| 31 | Hearing Audio & Transcript Release | A judge ordered the October 2025 sealed-hearing audio released in redacted form. No copy has ever appeared anywhere. | |
| 32 | Rental Vehicle Subpoenas | Agreements, telematics, tolls and damage inspections — an ordinary subpoena to a private company, served while the data still existed. | |
| 33 | FBO & Ground-Handling Records | A flight trace shows where an aircraft was. The signed, timestamped fuel ticket shows what it did on the ground. | |
| 34 | ADS-B Authentication & Custody | How citizen-recovered flight data actually gets in front of a jury — and why the control test is the authentication. | |
| 35 | University Property Records | Occupancy, keying, booking, access — and the utility consumption series, which shows an occupancy pattern with no witness at all. | |
| 36 | House Frontage Camera Canvass | The clearest illustration of what a day-one defense buys, and of what the retention clock takes away. | |
| 37 | Campus Camera Inventory & Retention | The State produced footage. From how many cameras, out of how many that exist? Without the denominator the numerator means nothing. |
The Second Score Card — The Nine Contentions
The table above scores instruments: individual motions and subpoenas. This second, shorter card scores arguments. Each row is one position the AI defense attorney would advance and would have to prove, and the question is different: not should this have been done, but does this contention hold up as a defense?
Score each one Holds / Partly / Does not hold / Cannot tell from outside, and read the "What would defeat this thesis" block on each page before you decide — every one of them names the single result that would end it.
| # | Contention | Route | Your score |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | The mechanism of death was an explosive, not a rifle round | Mechanism | |
| T2 | Federal handling has kept material out of the case | The investigation | |
| T3 | A foreign state decided, and people here were told beforehand | The investigation | |
| T4 | US military intelligence acted on foreign direction | The investigation | |
| T5 | The diverted pursuit consumed the critical hours | The investigation | |
| T6 | Aircraft supported the operation, and ground vehicles were rented | The investigation | |
| T7 | Handsets on a foreign carrier were present on campus | The investigation | |
| T8 | A university-owned property near the site was used | The investigation | |
| T9 | Exculpatory material exists and has not been provided | The investigation |
The one question the second card is really asking
A defense does not have to prove who did it. It has to stop twelve jurors being sure this defendant did. So after you have scored the nine rows, answer one more:
If you were a juror, and you believed only the rows you scored "Holds" — would you be sure?
Scoring The Whole Thing
When you have marked every row, answer the two questions that actually matter.
Question 1 — Of the rows you marked P, how many are steps that are available right now? Only those rows can support any inference at all. A P against a step that is not yet due is a statement about the calendar, not about counsel.
Question 2 — Of those, how many would be visible to you if they had been taken? A sealed motion looks exactly like no motion. A retained expert who never testifies looks exactly like no expert. If the honest answer is that you could not tell either way, the correct mark is ?, and a card full of question marks is a correct result, not a failed one.
What This Score Card Is Not
It is not a complaint, a grievance, or an evaluation of any licensed attorney's competence. Nobody named on this site is accused of anything by it.
It is a structured way for a citizen to read a capital case and notice which questions have been asked and which have not — which is the whole reason this investigation exists.
Related
- AI Defense Attorney — the nine contentions and thirty-seven instruments
- The Day-One Track — what was still recoverable in autumn 2025, and what is not
- Two Tracks Compared — the counterfactual against the visible record
- Method — the rules the exercise follows
- Trial Cursor — where the case is right now
- Legal Documents
- Days in Court
This page is a theoretical exercise. It is a written simulation of how an idealized 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.