In my limited experience and understanding, I would think any information pertaining to the case that is possible evidence would be presented to the court in order to determine the most appropriate verdict. So why seal documents if they could heavily impact the verdict? Isn’t that like saying “Hey, the defendants gun was recovered, but we’re going to set that fact aside, and you can’t use that against him.”
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the court is who decides all of this in the first place. So, the court DID see it.
sealing a document generally just means it is not public information and therefore will not be available to the public pertaining to a case. sometimes a trial involves information that is proprietary, a matter of national security, personally damning information about a victim, etc. The public doesn’t need to know or shouldn’t know those things, so they seal it.
You’re confusing that with exclusion of evidence. All evidence is submitted to the court. Whether the jury hears about it is up to the judge.
Generally, the prosecutor has to give over all of the details of an investigation to the defense as soon as they know it (or at least a reasonable amount of time prior to a trial.) If the defense has an issue with any of the evidence, they would ask the court to throw it out. The judge decides if that happens or not.
If they recovered the defendants gun, but the judge decided that it can’t be presented to the jury…….it’s most likely because it was gained illegally or there was an issue with the chain of custody.
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