State of Minnesota v. Nicholas Rekieta, Kayla Rekieta, April Imholte

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Will Nicholas Rekieta take the plea deal offered to him?

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AnOminous said:
Sometimes this is done in a sidebar with the jury excluded because it involves discussing material that might not be admissable. As convenient as things like MNDES can be, especially with cases often getting more voluminous than in the past, it has created a certain level of confusion compared to the old-fashioned way.
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For me its just unclear how items can be uploaded as evidence, references in a brief, argued about in the hearing, made available for the public once the case was over, and then retroactively removed as evidence because suddenly "uh oh, that was just a mistake and it was never used!"

I wonder how an appeals court would decide now if Nick were to appeal his case for a technicality, but it requires the April footage to be offered as evidence during the hearing.
Was it just a mistake? Or was the removal the mistake? I just think its weird that the court has the power to change the past and undo an event as if it had never happened.
 
Gobermental Supervisor said:
I just think its weird that the court has the power to change the past and undo an event as if it had never happened.
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Well, maybe it doesn't. It seems to think it does. I'm worried an appeals court may still defer to a ruling like this, though, since overruling it is more or less calling the trial court judge a liar.
 
Gobermental Supervisor said:
, and viewing the footage was only skipped
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The evidence was reviewed and described by the Judge and upon request made determinations on how and where it can be accessed. It was obviously not skipped and nevertheless it is obviously public data
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Harvey Danger said:
Which is why I was focusing on that word as well. But searching through the Rules of evidence and of Civil Procedure, I can't find anything that defines or specifies what "presented" means. The shown-but-not-accepted category seems to be called "offered", in that a party offers evidence to the court, which then undertakes the approve/reject process. Accepted items can then be "presented" to the jury "as evidence" of some matter, and the jury can decide to accept/reject it as dispositive against the underlying question; but even that isn't defined, it's just referenced once or twice.

If the difference between offered/presented and accepted mattered so much, why doesn't the advisory opinion use the word accepted? If "presented" actually means "accepted", why isn't the proper term being used when it's all over the RoE and RCP?

Like, no kidding, lawyers get super anal about specific words that have specific meanings in the legal realm. But either everyone here is using the wrong word, or they're using a term of art in a slightly informal way that isn't written down. They expect everyone to just know the meaning of a word without having it autistically defined somewhere, which goes against the Everything's Legally Precise theory. And if it isn't defined, then the way it's being used here seems very open to "presented" meaning "offered" just as well as "accepted".

Unless I missed a core definition somewhere, which is always possible. Maybe I'm text searching in the wrong places. But then I would have expected some of the actual lawyers in this case to have cited to it by now.
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It does not turn around acceptance of evidence, but presentation of evidence. Evidence that was rejected by the Judge but not stricken is evidence that is public (bar some limitations). If I sued you for defamation because you called me a pedo and it caused me to lose my job and you tried to present evidence from a disciplinary hearing at my job that I was fired for sexual harassment (or something else) instead, but the court didn't accept it; it is still public data free for perusal for the public and more importantly appellate courts.
Friend of Dorothy Parker said:
Presented means offered.
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And what happens when you "offer" a piece of evidence make numerous references to it, the opposing party references it, the court reviews it, public gets to see it, and so on? 'Cause that is exactly what happened here.
 
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Useful_Mistake said:
It does not turn around acceptance of evidence, but presentation of evidence. Evidence that was rejected by the Judge but not stricken is evidence that is public (bar some limitations).
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Which is why I keep arguing that, because even the MNDES FAQ text agrees.

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I had a 2000+ word post autistically covering the judge's June 16th ruling, its use of accepted vs offered, and so on. But it would've just been clutter. TL;DR is that the judge talks about "accepted" being an erroneous marking, which it likely was, but then out of thin air he just asserts it was never "offered" either. No analysis, no justification, he just accepts the prosecution+defense request declaring it so.

After thoroughly going through that ruling, this part raised an eyebrow.

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The entire rest of the ruling talks about how the footage was erroneously marked as "admitted". However, saying an exhibit can be marked as offered AND/OR admitted implies there are multiple fields, or multiple compound values within a single field (picklist), that indicate an exhibit's real status. An exhibit should be able to be one of pre-hearing, offered, offered+admitted, or offered+rejected. Logically, it should never be possible for an exhibit to be marked "admitted" without also being offered; the question is how Offered status is tracked.

It's likely both statuses are stored in a single picklist, with offered+admitted being labeled Admitted and offered+rejected as Rejected. Court staff just changes the status down the single path as it changes over time. Looking at the MNDES training materials, this seems to be the case, with only a single Status field listed.

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That's fine, technically speaking, as long as there's an audit trail to show when statuses change. Except maybe for weird edge cases, like this one where the two statuses are important separately.

While the ruling says the Admitted status was set in error, it never once mentions if the footage's offered status was set in MNDES. The judge orders a change to the Admitted status based on his analysis, then hurries on to declare they were never offered either. But he doesn't analyze an Offered status, or say it how it was marked in MNDES. Presumably his staff just skipped the Status straight from blank to Admitted after the hearing, so there was no Offered status to call out separately.

If this field was ever set to Offered, that would be significant. Hardin or the judge would need to check the record history in the audit trail. The judge might not care, since he already declared it NOT Offered, but it could boost Hardin's case if someone had to manually observe the hearing and determine the Offered status had been reached.

(As a secondary indicator of Offered status, the Hearing Type field is described as "The type of hearing in which exhibit was offered". Presumably an exhibit uploaded in pre-hearing status would have that blank, until it is actually used in court. So if it's filled in, then that indicates the staff believes the exhibit was at least Offered at a hearing, regardless of Admitted status. I wonder if the bodycam exhibits have this field filled out? Did the 6/16 order intend to vacate this field as well, even after the footage was discussed?)
 
They are trying to gaslight the appeals court into believing their revised history version of how the system is actually working, when the working practice means every single item uploaded and offered into evidence for a hearing, is public.

This is an attempt to retroactively change their own court rules to prevent footage being published which the public has the right to.
Which is why I think Hardin should be sneakily requesting documents of cases in which similar events took place, evidence offered through MNDES without being formally accepted by the judge, to prove that the working practice is those files are readily available and accessible to the public.
 
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Gobermental Supervisor said:
when the working practice means every single item uploaded and offered into evidence for a hearing, is public
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That extreme is also not completely true. Some evidence can be under seal for the eyes of the parties only (and the Judge and Jury if need be), but that's usually for cases not in public eye and concerning evidence like private medical records.

It generally isn't applicable here because the evidence wasn't under seal and was found by the Judge to be public before the turnaround.
 
Useful_Mistake said:
That extreme is also not completely true. Some evidence can be under seal for the eyes of the parties only (and the Judge and Jury if need be), but that's usually for cases not in public eye and concerning evidence like private medical records.

It generally isn't applicable here because the evidence wasn't under seal and was found by the Judge to be public before the turnaround.
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Well yes, of course there are reasons that items not not available (like minors involved) or while a case is still ongoing.

I just find it curious that their civilian oversight and FAQ completely disagree with the judge who is trying to redcon the Rekieta arrest.
 
Useful_Mistake said:
It's not a perfect fit, but it also recognizes the principle that you can't make an "accidentally" released documents private again.
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Didn’t Hardin et al cite something from the Fourth Circuit with a similar fact pattern? I don’t remember the case name, and I can’t easily find it.
 
Lian Xing said:
Didn’t Hardin et al cite something from the Fourth Circuit with a similar fact pattern? I don’t remember the case name, and I can’t easily find it.
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I believe you might be mistaken it for the 3rd Circuit. From Mr. Hardin's appellate brief:

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IANAL, but might there not be a good Common Law argument here for publicity and transparency of the courts? Could it not be argued that this obfuscation of evidence (in a closed case, no less) is a return to the judicial opacity of the Star Chamber?

This is rhetorical hyperbole, but the principle remains that judicial process is supposed to (in theory) be consistent and auditable by the public.
 
Was it given an exhibit number? Would that make a difference to how the rules are applied/interpreted?

I genuinely find this debate fascinating.
 
Hellblazer said:
Was it given an exhibit number?
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As far as I can tell, this exhibit list in filing #79 in case 34-CR-24-341 has everything that was received and given an exhibit number. The bodycam footage isn't on this list, and presumably the state's argument will be that this is the beginning and end of what should be publicly available.
However this doesn't tell us anything about whether the bodycam was ever classified as "offered", as others pointed out upthread.
 

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Kosher Dill said:
However this doesn't tell us anything about whether the bodycam was ever classified as "offered", as others pointed out upthread.
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And as the common law argument would go, it was still uploaded to MNDES, it was treated as a public record until SOMETHING happened, involving a certain Balldo Man having a bitchy little gay panic attack, and the public was actively viewing and commenting on it publicly.

It suddenly being declared Top Secret whatever is deeply suspicious.
 
Kosher Dill said:
As far as I can tell, this exhibit list in filing #79 in case 34-CR-24-341 has everything that was received and given an exhibit number. The bodycam footage isn't on this list, and presumably the state's argument will be that this is the beginning and end of what should be publicly available.
However this doesn't tell us anything about whether the bodycam was ever classified as "offered", as others pointed out upthread.
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Of course its not on the list, the entire point of the case is that its not on it because a judge decided to remove it after the fact in collusion with the prosecution and defense.
 
I practice the "living, breathing document" theory of law with regards to both the Constitution and state and federal statute - the law means whatever I want it to mean. And I want it to mean that the bodycam footage gets released. Brb need to draft an amicus brief

(I learned law from watching Nick Rekieta)
 
Today the Court of Appeals finally scheduled oral argument viewable live via Zoom, so mark your calendars:

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[L]

Note that they do not publish the Zoom instructions in the actual court file like district courts do, and those will instead be published on the Court of Appeals weekly calendar that is updated each Friday, so they should be visible by refreshing this link on November 14th:

https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/appellate/court-of-appeals/Calendar-for-Internet.pdf

With no Zoom hearings next week the current iteration doesn't have a good example of what to look for, but the court's instruction video depicts that here in pertinent part:


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For those who miss Nick's real-time Zoom reactions that cannot be recorded (or recorded legally anyway), at least complete audio will be available by searching "039" (without quotes) the following day or two at this link:

https://mncourts.gov/courtofappeals/oralargumentrecordings
 
Folgers Can said:
For those who miss Nick's real-time Zoom reactions that cannot be recorded (or recorded legally anyway), at least complete audio will be available by searching "039" (without quotes) the following day or two at this link:
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Could we get a heads up on what to expect in this proceeding?
At the top level I understand it’s Hardin suing Minnesota for denying him and us the bodycam, and the argument centers around MNDES and what is counted as evidence.
But what is Nick’s involvement exactly, other than watching from the cuck chair?
 
Oxyjen said:
Could we get a heads up on what to expect in this proceeding?
At the top level I understand it’s Hardin suing Minnesota for denying him and us the bodycam, and the argument centers around MNDES and what is counted as evidence.
But what is Nick’s involvement exactly, other than watching from the cuck chair?
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He's going to amaze the panel by implying how smart he is (everyone tells him that) and get that footage destroyed.
 
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