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by AnimalMuppet 558 days ago
No, I do not know.

But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.

(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
1 comments
JacobThreeThree 558 days ago
The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.

The rest of your post is speculation.

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AnimalMuppet 558 days ago
skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.
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JacobThreeThree 558 days ago
>the rest of the record of the case

Is that not available somewhere? You'd think it would be presented in detail, since this is the key reason for the default judgement.

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AnimalMuppet 558 days ago
I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.

I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)

For state courts... I don't know.

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