November 11, 2020 - APPEAL MOSCOW CITY COURT-DAY 2
November 11, 2020. Moscow City Court - Appeal Day 2
Trevor's father and representatives from the U.S. Embassy were allowed to attend the appeal hearing. The media was not allowed inside due to pandemic restrictions. Several media outlets requested permission to attend and ABC News was outside the courtroom.
Following Trevor’s previous appeal hearing, he was provided with some more translations of his criminal trial transcripts. However, he has only been provided with about 1/3 of the total documents in English. The 3 Judge panel was pushing for the appeal hearing to move forward, but Trevor and his attorneys held fast and requested that he be provided with all trial court materials, translations, and audio tapes. This had so far been denied by the Golovinsky District court where the trial took place. Here are the other issues that Trevor and the attorneys presented to the appeals judges.
1. When Trevor was allowed to view court documents at the Golovinsky court last month so that his translator could interpret
them for him, all the documents were not provided. When the attorneys requested the other documents, they were told they
were not available. The journal that keeps track of which documents are checked out, only included the documents he was
given. But when the journal was provided to the appeal court with the case files, it showed that Trevor had been shown the
missing documents on the same date. In other words, the journal was changed after not showing Trevor the documents. This
isn’t the first instance of falsified documents.
2. The translations of court transcripts were barely understandable.
3. The parts that were understandable were often grossly incorrect. Examples would include “Trevor having sex in the back seat
of the police car” and “The police officer vomited”. These were not in any files, but simply incorrectly translated.
4. There are sections of the trial documents that were not provided to the appeal court.
5. There are specific parts of the documents that may have omitted or incorrectly documented what was said or done in court.
6. The multiple requests by Trevor and attorneys to review the audio recordings of the trial have been ignored by the Golovinsky
District Court.
The judge stated that the defendant is not entitled to a complete word for word translation of the trial transcripts nor is he entitled to review all of the audio tapes. The judge was condescending to the defense attorneys. He tried to tell Trevor that the attorneys had misinformed him about requesting word for word translations. (This appeared to be an attempt to pressure them). The judge kept asking how much time Trevor would need to further review what he had already been given. Trevor would not give an answer, and continued to request access to all documents and audio so that he could determine if the written documents provided by Golovinsky court matches what actually was said in the trial courtroom. The judge finally relented and sent the case back to the Golovinsky District Court so that the defense can review all the documents and audio tapes. We are not sure if the Moscow City court will accept the corrections requested by the defense, but hopefully they will be entered into the records for future appeals to higher courts.
Next Appeal Hearing is not scheduled at this time. It will be scheduled in the future after sufficient time for Trevor and attorneys to review all court documents.