On May 5, 2009, SaveWCAL attorney Michael McNabb filed a Motion re Briefs and Affidavit re Transcript [PDF, 4 pages, 224 KB] with the Minnesota Court of Appeals in the matter of SaveWCAL's Petition to Redress Breach of Trust.
The Motion requests the court to require St. Olaf College and Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) to file their responding briefs in the case within the 30 days of the service of SaveWCAL's brief on April 23, 2009.
Why? Because in it's Statement of Case, St. Olaf failed to inform the court that it had been in possession of the transcript of the hearing in district court for months and that the same transcript was automatically part of the record on appeal because the court reporter had filed the original transcript in the district court file in January 2009.
The Court of Appeals denied SaveWCAL's motion [PDF, 2 pages, 155 KB] because MPR had not received a copy of the transcript — a transcript that is completely unnecessary.
It appears that the judge who issued the decision did so before he had received the SaveWCAL Reply to MPR's Response.
The Court focused on the technical requirement of the rule rather than looking at the underlying reason for the MPR order for a transcript — to obtain more time to draft its brief.
The reason that MPR gave in its response for ordering the transcript — to have a transcript as part of the record on appeal — is nonsense because the transcript is not needed and, in any case, has been in the Rice County District Court file (and thus part of the record) since January 15, 2009!!
Had St. Olaf College and MPR been forthright and honest with the court and simply requested more time to prepare their briefs, SaveWCAL would have had absolutely no objection. Instead, they have chosen a very different path to accomplish that goal.
