Record Extract Court of Appeals 2018

Joint Record Extract. Syed vs State – Maryland Court of Appeals 2018 September Term

New evidence for Adnan Syed’s case was made available by the Court of Appeals, including Asia Mclain’s testimony from the 2016 PCR Hearing in front of Judge Welch.  We’ve also uploaded each new documents as an individual file and added links to alternative copies of the other files, because many of the record extract copies are poor quality.

Jump to Index and File Links

What is this file for?

A “record extract” is just the pieces of evidence (from the wider record) that are needed to support the particular arguments made in that appeal. Under the Maryland Rules, and by Court Order, the State was supposed to submit this on August 22, 2018, alongside their first brief. Instead they submitted this appendix literally a cut an paste job from other filings to other courts, including many documents that were not referenced in their appeal briefing, and some that haven’t even been presented to Circuit Court, and arguably are not part of the record. Still, only thirty-one days later, the State did submit a file that actually met the requirements. Heckuva job Thiru!

Technically, Adnan and his lawyers had to give permission for this to be handed in late, and it seems this co-operation, and the extreme late submission (actually after Adnan’s deadline to respond – using this extract!), means that documents needed to support Justin Brown’s arguments in his Sept 20 brief were also included, hence it is a “joint” extract. There may yet be more evidence to the Court of Appeals alongside the coming briefs, we will add those to this page.

COA’s original files were scanned from a printed set of documents, which the State appears to have made from a collection of other scanned or photocopied documents, often shrinking the page size too. The end result is a patchy visual quality that isn’t digitally searchable but in very large files sizes. So (as with all the files on this wiki) we’ve run Optical Character Recognition, reduced the file size and, in this case, broken the files into smaller chunks making it much easier to find the section you want without reading or scanning through hundreds of pages. We’ve also included links to other copies, which are often significantly more legible than the ones in the extract.

Court of Appeals

Thanks are due to the Maryland Court of Appeals who published the record extract, along with other files on their “Highlighted Cases” page. Including the record extract in more recent years is a welcome move towards a transparent and accessible court process. Maybe one day the Court of Special Appeals will follow suit and publish the Appendices they mislabelled, mis-loaded, and simply withheld when they looked at the case back in 2017.

Also, readers may be interested to know that a full set of all documents which are part of the official court “record” were sent to the COA from the Court of Special Appeals (who previously judged that Adnan should have a new trial). Under Maryland Rule 8-501 c: “The fact that a part of the record is not included in the record extract or an appendix to a brief shall not preclude an appellate court from considering it.” In other words, any of the seven1 COA judges will be able to refer to, or at the hearing ask questions about any of the case documents, not just those listed here.”

1 There are currently seven judges on the Court, but Judge Sally Adkins will retire before the hearing for this case. We don’t know yet if a replacement will be in place in time, so there may be only six judges.

Volume 1

Volume 2

Key to the Index table (below)

Click the “+” button to show hidden info for each document.
Annotations to the original index are shown in square brackets [ ].
C Ex = Cited Excerpt.
PCR2 Exhibit Folder A was a (partial) copy of Cristina Gutierrez’s files.
PCR2 Exhibit Folder B was a (partial) copy of the 2015 Baltimore Police MPIA file.
Links: To save space, we only made separate copies of files that were new to the wiki, marked 2 , other main links will open the relevant extract volume to the relevant page.
Alternative copy: these links go to files containing a different copy of the same single document, mostly smaller and quicker to load, often much better quality. Except the trial transcript files which are generally are much longer, the extract contains only the few pages cited in the appeal.
Click column headings to Sort and/or use the Search to filter the visible rows.

Index

HINT: Try typing “new” in the Search box!