Savage v. United States

Issue: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit properly held — in conflict with decades of federal practice endorsing flexible procedures to assemble a complete record on appeal — that an appellant seeking a complete appellate record must overcome procedural impediments lacking any basis in Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 10’s text: namely, that when an appellant lacks any “means” to “prepare a statement of” untranscribed “proceedings” under Rule 10(c), the district court has no obligation to assist in reconstructing those proceedings unless the appellant first files a declaration “saying he does not remember what happened,” and that when an appellant wishes to review and supplement the record with undocketed trial correspondence in the district court’s possession, he must first show how the correspondence would “give rise to ‘any difference[s]’ about whether the record truly discloses what occurred in the district court.”