Exclusion of digital evidence for failure to comply with the trial court’s discovery rulings; MCR 6.201(J); People v Burwick; People v Rose

In an interlocutory appeal, the court held that the trial court abused its discretion in excluding the digital evidence at issue as a discovery sanction. Thus, it reversed the orders excluding the evidence for failure to comply with the trial court’s discovery rulings and remanded. Defendant “requested copies of data recovered from three cell phones found in his car and a copy of all data obtained from the ‘CUE unit’” (the information and entertainment system in Cadillac vehicles) that was taken from the car. The trial court later ordered that the electronic discovery the prosecution produced on 10/15/24 be excluded. The court noted that defendant admitted at a “hearing that the motion to exclude evidence for the failure to produce it did not relate to the CUE because” he had received that information. As a result, the court found that the “trial court’s order excluding the evidence from the CUE ‘for reasons stated on the record,’ i.e., the prosecutor’s failure to provide the information, constituted an abuse of discretion.” As to the cell phone data, the court found that the record indicated “the failure to produce the discovery in a timely fashion was at least equally defendant’s and the prosecution’s fault.” It determined that had defense counsel “reached out to the prosecutor or the [trial] court . . . when she realized she could not view the data on the hard drive, the matter likely could have been promptly addressed. Instead, [she] waited nearly five months to raise the issue. Despite evidence indicating that the prosecutor was unaware that defense counsel could not view the data during that time period, the” trial court ruled for defendant, which the court concluded “constituted an abuse of [its] discretion.” The court held that the circumstances here “simply did not justify the extreme remedy of exclusion.” It directed that on “remand, the prosecution should be afforded the opportunity to facilitate additional software or necessary tools to allow defendant to meaningfully analyze the data.”