LATAH COUNTY, Idaho — Attorneys for Bryan Kohberger, charged in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students in 2022, say the pressure to convict is so severe that some Latah County residents are predicting lynch mobs or riots if he is acquitted. They're looking to move the trial to Ada County.
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. The case also spurred a flurry of news coverage, much of which Kohberger's defense team says was inflammatory and left the 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.
Amani El-Alayli, a professor at Eastern Washington University who researches social cognition and bias, told the judge that studies have shown that people who are exposed to publicity about a case are more likely to render a guilty verdict at trial because of the way the human brain processes information.
That's partly because people are less likely to think critically about information when they are just casually consuming the news, she said, and partly because of “classic conditioning,” a type of unconscious learning where the brain creates associations between certain stimuli and responses. Conditioning can happen when people repeatedly see the defendant's name or photo next to words like “murder” or “students killed,” she said, or when they hear a name connected to something they had an emotional response too — like the fear that another crime might happen, or sadness that someone died.
“We've seen the pictures with these ominous headlines — that connection can't help but be created,” El-Alayli said. “People aren't trying to be biased. It's just that when we're in a mood, those moods filter the information that we take in.”
Seeing authority figures like a police chief or even someone with a commanding presence say that a person is a suspect can also create a bias, she said, particularly in small towns where potential jurors might personally know the authority figure making the claim.
There's no known method to undo that bias once it is created, El-Alayli said, and carefully questioning jurors or giving them instructions to ignore things they have previously heard or read about the case generally isn't very effective.
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.
Bryan Edelman, a trial consultant and the cofounder of Trial Innovations, which conducted the the study, also testified for the defense. He said that since November 2022, there have been roughly 440 articles published about the case in Latah County's local news outlets — including The Moscow-Pullman Daily News, The Lewiston Tribune, and the University of Idaho's student newspaper the Argonaut. The local population is about only 40,000 people, he said.
The defense attorneys provided more details about Edelman's survey in a court document filed earlier this month. Some of the respondents made dire predictions, 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.
