Bryan Kohberger's legal team may have found a new way to attempt to have his murder charges thrown out following a court document filed this week.
On Tuesday, Kohberger's lawyer, Anne Taylor, who serves as the Kootenai County chief public defender, called on the state to provide the full record of the grand jury proceedings following his indictment on four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary.
"Release of the grand jury proceedings, governed by Rule and Statute, are materials necessary to Mr. Kohberger's defense," the court document said. "A grand jury was empaneled at a time when the small community of Moscow, Idaho had been exposed to 6 months of intense local, national and international media coverage.
"Because the state has provided extensive discovery, Mr. Kohberger knows that exculpatory evidence exists. Whether a fair and impartial panel of grand jurors was assembled amid intense media coverage is a significant question the Defense must evaluate."
The court filing this week comes after Kohberger was indicted by the grand jury in Moscow and appeared in court. During his appearance, Taylor said that her client was "standing silent" prompting Judge John Judge to enter not guilty pleas for each of the charges against him.
Kohberger, 28, was arrested at his parent's residence in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, in December 2022 after the fatal stabbing of four University of Idaho students in November: Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Ethan Chapin, 20 and Xana Kernodle, 20.
As Taylor mentioned in her court filing, the crime prompted widespread media coverage and on social media where online sleuths dug into numerous parts of the case trying to find clues. Prior to Kohberger's arrest, the Moscow Police Department repeatedly urged the public to avoid spreading rumors and to only listen to information from police and other law enforcement officials.
Jennifer Coffindaffer, a former FBI agent, told Newsweek on Thursday that the media coverage of the case does not necessarily mean there will be a partial jury.
"You can know generally that four kids were murdered at the University of Idaho but does it mean you can't be impartial?" Coffindaffer said. "How they have overblown that you can't find an impartial jury is just not true...I think certainly there's a lot of media coverage but that it's impacting the possibility to get a fair and impartial jury panel is exacerbating the effect that media is having on this case."
Kohberger's legal team is entitled to the transcript of the grand jury, Coffindaffer said, but she noted that they are likely looking for "everything," such as people who were subpoenaed, or anything that could have been said off the record.
Similarly, Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist, told Newsweek that the motion "is another attempt by defense attorney Anne Taylor to find ways to delay or stop the proceedings against Bryan Kohberger."
"On the one hand, it can be seen as a defense attorney working hard to go all out for their client. But, questioning the objectivity of the grand jury doesn't seem like a winning argument. People all over the world have been exposed to the media about Kohberger mostly negative, but some positive," Lieberman said.
Newsweek reached out to the Kootenai County Public Defender's office via email for comment.
