Score Card — The Ideal Defense Attorney
:::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. :::
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, twenty-one 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 organisation. 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. |
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 twenty-one pages
- Method — the rules the exercise follows
- Trial Cursor — where the case is right now
- Legal Documents
- Days in Court
:::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.