The Trial Day

What does the trial-court record establish about how ADA-related access issues, the presence and removal of Miller’s advocate, and the court’s characterization of Miller’s silence as waiver of counsel unfolded within one proceeding — and where does that record complicate a reading of any one of these as an isolated, unconnected event?

This room draws primarily on the trial transcript and a related post-trial statement, cross-confirmed against each other throughout. Several items rest instead on the defendant’s own first-person account, clearly marked wherever they appear. This room did not search exhaustively for evidence complicating that account; it reports what was found. One substantial body of adjacent, well-documented material — a broader, ongoing conflict involving several of the same individuals, continuing well past this proceeding — was deliberately left out as outside this room’s question, and is noted here, not hidden.

Before the trial — appointment and breakdown

The record shows: counsel was appointed by court order roughly two weeks before entering an appearance — the fourth attorney assigned to the case after three predecessors withdrew for conflict.

The defendant said (later, in reconstructing this record): he was never given signed notice of the appointment, and describes a document that appeared unsigned at the time — leading to a trip to the Clerk of Courts, and a sidebar in which a judge signed it in his presence.

The docket confirms the formal appointment order’s filing dates. It does not confirm or disconfirm the specific signature sequence described, and no sidebar exchange addressing it appears in the transcript.

The night before

The record shows: late the night before trial, the defendant emailed counsel revoking consent to representation, stating he had “lost all faith” in counsel’s ability to represent him.

Counsel said, the next morning, in open court: he had been at “complete loggerheads” with his client for ten days, over whether to try “an ADA case” instead of the underlying charge — and that the client had “sic[ked]” his outside advocate on him.

The colloquy

The Court: So, sir, are you representing yourself?
The Defendant: I do not have ADA access at this time, Your Honor.
The Court: I’ll take that as a yes. So you may call your first witness.
The Defendant: I object. I’m not representing myself. I am not waiving representation.
The Court: [Later] Well, guess what? You did — because you won’t answer my questions.

The advocate’s removal

The record shows, across two remote sessions: the court twice raised a banner visible on the advocate’s screen, reading that recording was “in progress for disability mitigation.” Asked directly, four times, whether he was recording, the advocate did not answer yes or no — each time redirecting to a request that any discussion of “disability accommodations” happen privately.

The Court: He can’t answer a simple question. So I don’t think that he could possibly help Mr. Miller.

Earlier in the same session: counsel told the court, unprompted, “I have a feeling he might be recording” — about his own client. And moments before that: when the defendant told the court “I do not have ADA access,” counsel said to him, “Would you like to go downstairs with the sheriff?”

The accommodation letter

The record shows: counsel began reading a twelve-item accommodation list aloud, at the defendant’s request that it be read in full. The court interrupted after the first item and took the physical letter instead.

What the remaining eleven items stated. They were never entered into the transcript.

Witnesses

The record shows: three witnesses testified for the prosecution. A defense witness the defendant had hoped to call does not appear anywhere in the record — no subpoena was ever requested on his behalf.

The 1925(a) opinion states: the court “received no request to subpoena any witness on behalf of the defense,” and that subpoena requests are the parties’ responsibility, not the court’s.

The most readily available reading of this proceeding — that a defendant’s silence became waiver through his own uncooperativeness — sits beside a separate, harder-to-reconcile fact: the same defendant had, hours earlier, revoked his own trust in the counsel now standing beside him. Neither fact cancels the other. Both are part of the same record.

A single day’s proceedings — and the weeks leading into it — can hold several simultaneous, overlapping pressures: a client’s revoked trust in counsel, an advocate’s disability-related request for privacy treated as evasion, an appointed attorney’s private knowledge diverging from what the formal record shows. None of these, on its own, proves an outcome was wrong. Together, they show how much of what actually happens around a proceeding can remain outside the record that later stands in for it.

Names appear here only where their conduct or statements are directly examined by this room’s question. A broader, separate conflict involving several of the same individuals — well documented elsewhere — is not part of this record.