Bryan Kohberger Request Denied by Court

A judge has once again rejected Bryan Kohberger’s attempts to get his indictment thrown out.

Kohberger, 29, is charged with four counts of murder and one count of burglary in connection with the deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20. The four University of Idaho students were found fatally stabbed in an off-campus rental home in Moscow, Idaho, on November 13, 2022.

At the time of the slayings, Kohberger was a graduate student studying criminology at Washington State University in nearby Pullman. He was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania in December 2022 after investigators pieced together DNA evidence, cellphone data and surveillance video that they say linked him to the crime.

The judge entered not-guilty pleas on Kohberger’s behalf last year. He faces the death penalty if convicted. A trial date has not been set, but prosecutors have requested a date in the summer.

Judge John Judge previously rejected Kohberger’s attempts to throw out the grand jury indictment in December. Kohberger’s attorneys had said that the indictment should be tossed because the prosecution improperly withheld evidence from grand jurors; the jurors were biased; there was insufficient evidence to justify the indictment; and there was prosecutorial misconduct.

Kohberger’s attorneys later filed a motion to reconsider the orders, and the judge heard arguments on January 26.

In an order on February 1, the judge again rejected the motion to have Kohberger’s indictment thrown out and also denied the request for permission to appeal to a higher court. The case “has already been pending for a year and at this juncture, trial may not even be set until spring or summer 2025,” Judge wrote in the ruling.

“If an appeal is granted now, the case will essentially come to a halt for some period while the appellate court reviews the grand jury proceedings, causing even further delay,” Judge added. “And the gain to Defendant, even assuming a permissive appeal is granted by the appellate court and the appellate court rules in Defendant’s favor, is de minimis as the State has stated that charges would immediately be refiled.”

The likelihood of Kohberger “being released from custody, even if the indictment were dismissed by a higher court, is essentially nonexistent,” Judge said.

The judge wrote that, while the case is “exceptional” because Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and is facing the death penalty if convicted, the “issues raised by Defendant’s motions to dismiss the indictment are not exceptional, nor are they ‘substantial legal issues of great public interest’ or ‘legal questions of first impression.’

“If grand jury proceedings were routinely reviewed by appellate courts before jury trials, the system — both at the trial level and at the appellate level — would become bogged down. The grand jury is merely an investigative body tasked with determining if there is probable cause for Defendant to face the charges against him. Nothing the grand jury did has any bearing on the ultimate question of Defendant’s guilt or innocence.”

Kohberger’s attorneys are seeking a change of venue for his trial. They say he cannot receive a fair trial in the community where the killings occurred due to the “extensive, inflammatory pretrial publicity” in the case.

A gag order imposed in the case bars the prosecution, defense attorneys and law enforcement officials from discussing it.