Lawyers for man charged in deaths of 4 Idaho students say strong bias means trial should be moved
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Attorneys for the man charged in the 2022 stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students asked a judge to move the trial to a larger city during a hearing Thursday, citing the widespread media coverage of the case.
Bryan Kohberger’s defense team says strong emotions in the close-knit community and constant news coverage will make it impossible to find an impartial jury in the university town of Moscow, Idaho. They want the trial, set for June 2025, to be moved from Moscow to Boise or another large city.
Kohberger, a former criminal justice student at Washington State University, which is across the state line in Pullman, faces four counts of murder in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves.
The four University of Idaho students were killed sometime in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, in a rental house near the campus.
Police arrested Kohberger six weeks later at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, where he was spending winter break.
The killings stunned students at both universities and left the small city of Moscow deeply shaken. They also prompted widespread media coverage, much of which Kohberger’s defense team says was inflammatory and left the close-knit community strongly biased against their client.
Defense attorney Elisa Massoth’s first witness was James “Todd” Murphy, the president of media tracking company Truescope. Murphy testified that news coverage of the case has been more saturated in Latah County, where the university town is located, than it has been in other parts of the state.
Latah County has about 3% of the state’s population but the media exposure to the case was measured at about 36%, Murphy said. That compares to Ada County, where Boise is located, which had about 34% exposure and roughly 26% of the state’s population.
Kohberger first requested a change of venue in January, when his attorney Anne Taylor wrote in a court filing that a fair and impartial jury could be found in Latah County “owing to the extensive, inflammatory pretrial publicity, allegations made about Mr. Kohberger to the public by media that will be inadmissible at his trial, the small size of the community, the salacious nature of the alleged crimes, and the severity of the charges Mr. Kohberger faces.”
Defendants have a constitutional right to a fair trial, and that requires finding jurors that can be impartial and haven’t already made up their minds about the guilt or innocence of the person accused. But when the defense team hired a company to survey Latah County residents, 98% percent of the respondents said they recognized the case and 70% of that group said they had already formed the opinion that Kohberger is guilty. More than half of the respondents with that opinion also said nothing would change their mind, according to defense court filings.
Some respondents also made dire predictions, according to the filings, saying that if Kohberger is acquitted, “There would likely be a riot and he wouldn’t last long outside because someone would do the good ole’ boy justice,” “They’d burn the courthouse down,” and “Riots, parents would take care of him.”
Prosecutors wanted the judge to disregard the survey, saying it didn’t include all the data about people who declined to respond to the survey. Prosecutor Bill Thompson and Special Assistant Attorney General Ingrid Batey said in court documents that there are other ways to ensure a fair trial short of moving the proceeding hundreds of miles away, including widening the pool of potential jurors to include neighboring counties.
Any venue change would be expensive and also force court staffers, witnesses, experts, law enforcement officers and victims’ family members to make an inconvenient trip to the new location, the prosecution team said.
The media coverage of the investigation into the killings wasn’t limited to local and national news outlets. True crime-style television shows, books, podcasts and YouTube broadcasts also focused on the case, as have social media groups on sites like Facebook, Reddit and TikTok.
Taylor said the media coverage has “utterly corrupted” the atmosphere in Latah County.
“Once the police arrested Mr. Kohberger the public was ready to, and has, proceeded to vilify him without regard to the Constitutional guarantee of the presumption of innocence and a right to an impartial jury and fair trial,” Taylor wrote. “The media focus on Mr. Kohberger has been relentless and highly inflammatory.”