Boise, Idaho – A judge says a former roommate of Four students from the Idaho University They were killed in 2022 can testify about seeing an intruder with “thick eyebrows” at the time of crime.
Defensor lawyers of Bryan Kohberger had asked the 4th district judge Steven Hipler during a Audience earlier this month To prohibit any evidence that refers to “dense eyebrows”, because they say that the description of the fourth partner is not reliable and irrelevant to the case.
But in a ruling published on Friday, Hipler said that the testimony can be used during Kohberger’s trial on four murder positions. Ready to start at the end of this year.
Kohberger30, is accused of murder in the sharp deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves in a rental house near the campus in Moscow, Idaho.
Kohberger, then a graduate student of Criminal Justice at Washington State University, was Arrested in Pennsylvania weeks after deaths. The researchers said they coincided with their DNA with the genetic material recovered from a knife pod found in the crime scene.
When asked to declare the charges, Kohberger was silent, which led the judge to declare himself innocent in his name.
The roommate told the police that he saw someone with black clothes and a ski mask inside the house he shared with four roommates at some point before 4:19 am on the day of the murders, according to judicial documents.
He was intoxicated at that time and told the Police that he could not remember any other facial feature, but that the thick eyebrows of the intruder stood out in his memory.
Kohberger’s defense lawyers pointed out that the fourth partner also constantly questioned what he saw, that his attention was influenced by drowsiness and alcohol, and that his opportunity to see the intruder was second.
Allowing him to testify on the bushy eyebrows when he could not provide enough details to allow a police artist to make a compound sketch would be unfair and harmful, which makes a jury believe that Kohberger is guilty due to his eyebrows, his lawyers said.
But the judge did not agree.
“There is a great abyss between a finding that a witness is not competent to testify about what they witnessed personally, and simply allowing political trial through vigorous interrogation,” Hipler wrote. “This is an interrogation issue.”
Hippler also said that if Kohberger is convicted, his defense team cannot use his medical diagnoses to explain his “court behavior” unless Kohberger takes the position during the penalty phase.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to prevent any testimony during the Penalty phase on Kohberger’s autistic spectrum disorder, the compulsive obsessive disorder, as well as the development coordination disorder that Kohberger could have experienced in childhood.
The prosecutor’s team said they did not want mental conditions to try to limit Kohberger’s guilt if it is convicted.
But the defense team said they did not plan to do that at all, and that instead their diagnosis of autistic spectrum would be used to explain part of the behavior of the Kohberger court, as their tendency to maintain visual contact for a longer time than expected, its ability to stay very still and its stoicism.
The judge said he had not noticed any strange behavior.
“Not once, the court has perceived the defendant who acts in a strange or incongruous way or demonstrating signs in the law of lawyers that would guarantee any explanation to the jury. His behavior has been completely appropriate,” Hipler wrote.
The introduction of evidence about the diagnosis of the autistic spectrum would probably confuse the jury and take an improper amount of time in a long trial, he said.
Even so, said the judge, Kohberger’s behavior could become relevant if he takes the position to testify. Kohberger’s diagnosis of Kohberger could also be relevant at some point, said Hipler, particularly because the defense team has said that Kohberger experiences sleep difficulties that led to the custom of night driving and running to decompress.
If these scenarios arise during the trial, the judge said that lawyers should mention the matter, outside the presence of the jury, so that he can make a decision on whether the evidence must be introduced at that time.
