Adding Context to the Defense’s Failure to Call a Medical Examiner at Adnan’s Trial

On an episode of Undisclosed, we mentioned how we’d found a stray notebook page in the defense files:

In relevant part, this note seems to be instructing “Julie” to contact Dr. Robert Kirschner, a Chicago medical examiner, in connection with the Adnan Syed case. I wondered about this note because I’d always assumed that Julie, a second year law student who was clerking at Gutierrez’s firm, wasn’t involved in the Adnan Syed case. After all, when she was interviewed for Episode 10 of Serial, she said she wasn’t part of polling the jury after the mistrial and that the polling was done by Gutierrez and “the law clerks on [the case].”

Today, however, I was looking through the defense files and found this memo:

So, it turns out that Julie was working on Adnan’s case, albeit on a (seemingly) more limited basis than three other law clerks/students. I wonder why she was the one that Gutierrez designated to contact a medical examiner, assuming that Julie was actually ever given this note. 

In any event, here were the notes that Gutierrez ended up taking during Medical Examiner Dr. Korell’s direct testimony, which gives you an idea of her thought process on the forensic evidence:

 -CM