Opinion ID: 1527255
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The lack of a transcript.

Text: Superior Court Criminal Rule 36-I requires that all proceedings shall be simultaneously recorded verbatim by a court reporter or, in certain circumstances, by an electronic sound recording device. The reasons for this requirement are obvious; an appellate court should know what occurred at trial, rather than having to make do with the participants' best recollection. In the present case, an attempt to reconstruct what transpired at a relatively routine stipulated trial ten years earlier, when the participants had no reason to expect that anybody would ever again ask them to remember it, was necessarily hazardous. Indeed, the recollections of two of the principal witnesses on whom Judge Moore relied most heavilyJudge Murphy and Judge Dixondiffer in some significant particulars. [8] That the witnesses were compelled to resort to their recollections of what they usually did to determine what they probably did on this occasion, and to assume that they did not vary their usual practice in Legrand's case, is an additional limitation on the accuracy of the product.