Kohberger’s attorneys say strong bias means the murder trial should be moved

LATAH COUNTY, Idaho — Attorneys for the man accused in the 2022 stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students say the pressure to convict is so severe that some Latah County residents are predicting lynchings or riots if he is acquitted.

Bryan Kohberger’s defense attorney, Elisa Massoth, made that argument in a filing this month, saying the only way he can get a fair trial is to move him to a new location.

Judge John of the Second District is scheduled to preside over a hearing on the motion for change of venue on Thursday, August 28. If he agrees, the trial, set for June 2025, could be moved from Moscow to Boise or another larger city in Idaho. .

Kohberger, a former Washington State University criminal justice student who 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 November 13, 2022, in a rented house near campus.

Police arrested Kohberger six weeks later at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, where he was spending the winter vacation.

The murders stunned students at both universities and left the small city of Moscow deeply shaken. They also provoked widespread media coverage, which Kohberger’s defense team says was inflammatory and left the united community heavily biased against their client.

Kohberger first requested the 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 “due to the extensive publicity and incendiary pretrial publicity, the allegations made about Mr. Kohberger to the public by the media that will be inadmissible at his trial, the small size of the community, the salacious nature of the alleged crimes, and the seriousness of the charges Mr. Kohberger faces.”

Defendants have a constitutional right to a fair trial, and that requires finding jurors who can be impartial and who have not already made up their minds about the guilt or innocence of the accused person. But when the defense team hired a company to survey Latah County residents, 98 percent of respondents said they recognized the case, and 70 percent of that group said they had already formed an opinion that Kohberger was guilty. More than half of respondents with that view also said nothing would change their minds, according to defense court filings.

Some respondents also made dire predictions, according to the filings, saying that if Kohberger is acquitted, “There would probably be an uproar and it wouldn’t last long outside because someone would bring justice to the good boy,” “It would be burn the courthouse’ and ‘Riots, parents would take care of him’.

Prosecutors wanted the judge to throw out the survey, saying it did not include all the data on people who refused 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 without moving the proceedings hundreds of miles away, including expanding the pool of potential jurors to include neighboring counties.

Any change of venue would be costly and would also force court employees, witnesses, experts, law enforcement and victims’ family members to make an inconvenient journey to the new location, the prosecution team said.

Media coverage of the crime investigation was not limited to local and national news outlets. Television shows, books, podcasts and YouTube broadcasts have also focused on the case, as have social media groups on sites such as Facebook, Reddit and TikTok.

Taylor said the media coverage has “totally corrupted” the atmosphere in Latah County.

“Once the police arrested Mr. Kohberger, the public was primed and proceeded to vilify him without regard to the constitutional guarantee of the presumption of innocence and the right to an impartial jury and a fair trial,” Taylor wrote. “The media focus on Mr. Kohberger has been relentless and extremely inflammatory.”