Defense for Bryan Kohberger maintains push to toss lead evidence from murder trial

Ahead of an upcoming January court date, Bryan Kohberger’s attorneys made their final written arguments for excluding key pieces of evidence from the Idaho murder suspect’s trial next summer.

In the latest filings, the defense reasserted its prior allegations to try to justify to the judge why he should strike a multitude of state evidence in the high-profile case involving the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students. Across 10 briefs, two of which are sealed, Kohberger’s attorneys renewed claims of police misconduct to obtain warrants for various evidence, that some warrants lacked legally required specificity and that their client’s constitutional rights were violated during the investigation.

The defense submitted the new response filings earlier this month, but they were not released through a public Idaho courts website until Tuesday. The court hearing on the issue before Ada County District Judge Steven Hippler is scheduled for Jan. 23.

Kohberger’s defense team in November filed to suppress much of the state’s evidence against him, including information police acquired through their client’s Google, Amazon, Apple iCloud and AT&T cellphone accounts, as well as from his car, student apartment at Washington State University and his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. If Hippler grants the defense motions, it would prevent prosecutors from presenting the evidence to the jury at trial. 

Among the claims, Kohberger’s attorneys allege that investigators ignored their client’s right against unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment. His defense specifically targeted DNA evidence that police developed through an advanced crime-solving technique known as investigative genetic genealogy. 

IGG, for short, involves detectives leveraging ancestry websites to build a family tree and begin narrowing the list of possible suspects in a violent crime. The method, in which law enforcement uploads unidentified DNA from a crime scene to the services, was previously reserved for decades-old cold cases, but has recently become more common in active investigations.

Kohberger, 30, is accused in the November 2022 deaths of the U of I students at an off-campus home in Moscow. The victims were Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Washington. 

Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty if a jury finds the defendant guilty.

Police did not disclose the FBI’s use of IGG in the probable cause affidavit for Kohberger’s Dec. 30, 2022, arrest, which took place in Pennsylvania. In one of the latest filings, his defense said police identified Kohberger with IGG on Dec. 19 and the FBI began surveilling him at his parents’ home on Dec. 21. Nine days later, they took him into custody during an early-morning, no-knock raid that his defense argued was unnecessary and inappropriate. 

“The state seems to accept that a failure to abide by law as to knocking and announcing leads to the exclusion of what was found in Mr. Kohberger’s parents’ home,” defense attorney Jay Logsdon wrote in another of the filings. “This court must suppress this evidence.”

More than seven months after Kohberger’s arrest, prosecutors acknowledged for the first time that information from the use of IGG initially led investigators to suspect Kohberger of the quadruple homicide in Moscow. A single source of male DNA was located on a leather sheath for a combat-style knife found underneath one of the victims at the crime scene. It was processed and used to develop the suspect’s family tree. 

All evidence that police gathered as a result of that initial finding, including through search warrants and federal grand jury subpoenas, should therefore be withheld from Kohberger’s trial, his defense argued. Detectives later obtained Kohberger’s cellphone and online account records to help build their case, including obtaining their first search warrant related to Kohberger on Dec. 23. 

“Without IGG, there is no case, no request for his phone records, surveillance of his parents’ home, no DNA taken from the garbage on his driveway, in a gated community, under a garbage collection ordinance,” the defense wrote in a prior filing in November. 

In sealed briefs, the defense has alleged that police used false information to get a judge’s approval for search warrants and asked for what’s known as a Franks hearing to challenge the evidence acquired with them. Prosecutors objected to the holding of that hearing, and Hippler has yet to rule. 

The prosecution’s arguments against suppressing evidence over the use of IGG also were filed under seal, so they remain outside of the public eye. But prosecutors previously said in court that police did not rely on IGG evidence as justification with judges for any search warrants. 

Led by Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson, state attorneys also refuted the defense’s claims that police were overly broad in what evidence they sought in some search warrants. 

In addition, prosecutors argued that Idaho law extends ample discretion to judges in determining probable cause for the purposes of granting warrants. 

Kohberger’s capital murder trial was moved from Moscow to Boise earlier this year. It is scheduled to start in August 2025 and could run three months, including sentencing if necessary. Jury selection is set for late July.