What the Memo Actually Says
Read the following surveillance summary once, then work from it without re-reading until you are told to verify.
"SURVEILLANCE SUMMARY - 3 March. Subject R. Kalani departed 14 Coral Way at 08:12 driving a gray 2019 sedan, plate KRT-4471, confirmed as a Budget rental. At 08:55 he met an unidentified male at Delaney's Diner for 22 minutes and passed him a manila envelope. Kalani's phone was powered off from 08:20 to 09:10. At 11:40 he withdrew $4,800 in cash from the 9th Street branch. He arrived back at 14 Coral Way at 17:03. No other stops were observed."
A colleague later drafts a case summary containing the six statements in the first task.
1. Classify each statement as supported, contradicted, or not determinable from the memo, citing the text: (1) the sedan was a gray 2019 Budget rental, plate KRT-4471; (2) his phone was off for the entire diner meeting; (3) he withdrew $4,800 at 11:40; (4) he drove directly from the diner to the bank; (5) no other stops occurred; (6) his phone was off for 50 minutes.
Read the worked answer
- Supported. "gray 2019 sedan, plate KRT-4471, confirmed as a Budget rental" - all four elements are stated.
- Contradicted. The meeting ran 08:55 to 09:17 (08:55 plus 22 minutes); the phone was off 08:20 to 09:10. The phone was therefore on for roughly the last seven minutes of the meeting. The statement overstates by a small margin that matters - it is exactly the kind of overstatement a defense will use.
- Supported. "At 11:40 he withdrew $4,800 in cash from the 9th Street branch."
- Not determinable. The memo gives no departure time from the diner and no travel information. The gap from 09:17 to 11:40 is unexplained by the memo and must not be filled in by assumption.
- Not determinable. The memo says "no other stops were observed." Observation is not omniscience; an unobserved stop is not an absent one. The draft converts a limitation of surveillance into a fact about the subject.
- Supported. 08:20 to 09:10 is 50 minutes.
2. Without re-reading, which two details are most likely to be corrupted in retelling, and what verification step protects the case file?
Read the worked answer
Most vulnerable: the precise quantities and the boundary times. The plate (KRT-4471), the amount ($4,800), the meeting length (22 minutes), and the phone window endpoints (08:20 and 09:10) are unanchored strings of digits. They have no semantic hook, they are surrounded by plausible neighbors (08:30, 09:00, 20 minutes, $4,000), and retelling replaces them with the neighbor. The phone window is the worst case because both endpoints must survive intact for the fact to mean anything.
Second most vulnerable: the hedges. "No other stops were observed" and "unidentified male" degrade into "made no other stops" and "an associate" after one retelling, converting a surveillance limitation into a claim about the subject.
Verification step: nothing in the case file gets a number or a time that is not read back from the source memo and attributed to it - document name and page. Read-back is done against the memo, never against another summary. Any figure that cannot be traced to a source document is marked as unverified rather than carried forward.
3. The draft summary says: "Kalani withdrew $4,800 and his phone was off all morning." How do you correct it, and why does the precision matter?
Read the worked answer
Correction: "Kalani withdrew $4,800 in cash from the 9th Street branch at 11:40. His phone was powered off from 08:20 to 09:10, overlapping but not spanning his 08:55 meeting."
Why the correction is not nitpicking. "All morning" is false on the memo's own numbers - the phone was on from 09:10 onward and before 08:20. A defense attorney who establishes that one sentence is overstated gets to argue that the rest of the summary was drafted with the same care, and the phone window is one of the more probative facts in the file because it brackets the start of the meeting. An accurate version is also more useful: it says the phone was dark when he arrived at the diner, which is the point, and does not claim it stayed dark after he left.
Rule for the file: every number and time is quoted from its source document, hedges are preserved verbatim, and inferences are labeled as inferences. A summary that is 10% shorter and completely defensible is worth more than one that reads well and cannot be defended line by line.