According to defense attorney Wendy Lewis, there’s upwards of 11 terabytes of information the Summit County Attorney’s Office has produced as it gathered evidence for its prosecution of Kouri Richins.
One terabyte is the maximum amount of information a single top-of-the-line iPhone can store.
Richins is the Kamas mother of three who will stand trial in February for the murder of her husband Eric Richins and several financial crimes that prosecutors say point to her motive.
She has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges and may enter pleas in a separate case with dozens of financial charges in the coming weeks.
As prosecutors pursue both first-degree felonies and complex fraud charges, defense attorneys say the process lawyers call “discovery” has gotten unwieldy.
“I don't mean anything that has anything to do with whether she killed her husband or not. I'm talking about just the universe of prosecuting Kouri Richins has become outrageous,” defense attorney Kathy Nester said.
Third District Judge Richard Mrazik conferred with both sides Aug. 1 at a routine pretrial conference.
He noted that it’s a best practice from the perspective of prosecutors to overproduce rather than underproduce evidence.
But he still ordered the prosecutors to send the defense a draft version of their witness list and exhibits for the murder trial. That may shrink the amount of work needed to identify what's important in the data, which sometimes includes duplicate documents.
Prosecutor's final exhibits and witness list is due Oct. 31.
The trial was previously scheduled for spring 2025, but was pushed back as both sides asked the Utah Supreme Court to weigh in on jury-related issues.
The next pretrial conference to discuss how to manage the volume of data is Dec. 5.
