Qinxuan Pan (center) in state court Thursday with defense attorney Kevin Smith (left).
Qinxuan Pan still hasn’t seen the state-provided evidence against him, as his “protective custody” status keeps him out of the prison library where those documents are stored.
That discovery-viewing snafu came to light Thursday midday during the latest state court hearing in Pan’s ongoing criminal case.
State prosecutors have charged Pan, a MIT artificial intelligence researcher, with one felony count of murder for allegedly shooting and killing 26-year-old Yale grad student Kevin Jiang near Jiang’s fiancee’s apartment on Lawrence Street in East Rock on Feb. 6.
Pan is currently incarcerated at Cheshire Correctional Institution on a $20 million bond.
On Thursday at a quarter past noon in a sixth-floor courtroom at 235 Church St., Pan stood alongside defense attorney Kevin Smith for the latest hearing in the case.
Per state Superior Court Judge Gerald Harmon’s order the last time Pan was in court in late October, Pan was supposed to have spent the past month and a half reviewing what his legal team has described as a “voluminous” amount of evidence that the state has gathered as they make their case against him.
Smith told the judge on Thursday that Pan hasn’t been able to review those documents yet because “my client is being told by his counselor [at Cheshire Correctional Institution] that because he’s in protective custody, there is no way for him to access the library, and thus no way to access the materials that the court has provided earlier.”
“Protective custody” refers to a policy in state prison whereby certain inmates who require protection from other inmates are placed alone in their cells to reduce the risk of them getting hurt by a cellmate.
Smith said that the state prosecutor on the case will speak with the lieutenant at Cheshire Correctional to find some workaround so that Pan can actually review the discovery.
“Let’s make sure that happens, counsel,” Harmon replied. If Pan’s not able to get access to the discovery soon, the judge said, he’ll step in and do what needs to be done so that the defendant “will have access to the discovery on this matter.”
Harmon then continued Pan’s case until Feb. 2.
