Law&Crime Sidebar - Bryan Kohberger Judge Makes Concrete Ruling on DNA in Idaho Murders Case

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

The judge overseeing Bryan Kohberger’s quadruple murder case has made a ruling concerning the defense’s request to get access to all DNA records in the case. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber breaks down the latest in the Idaho student murders case with Professor Jules Epstein, the director of advocacy programs at Temple University Beasley School of Law.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:If you’re ever injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can submit a claim in 8 clicks or less without having to leave your couch. To start your claim, visit: https://www.forthepeople.com/LCSidebarHOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Ryan Kohlberger's defense attorneys can now review some potentially key DNA evidence in the case against the accused murderer. We break down the judge's ruling with law professor Jules Epstein. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. All right. So we have an update for you in the Brian Coburger case, and the question is how big of a deal is it?

What do we make of it? Now, to recap, Brian Coburger is the Washington State University grad student accused of murdering four University of Idaho students back in November of 2022. Ethan Chapin, Zana Kernotal, Haley Gonzalez, and Madison Mogan. They were all found stabbed to death inside of a large, off-campus rental house at the University of Idaho. There was a massive police investigation as basically the entire Moscow police department started looking for who did this. And after this massive investigation, about six weeks after the murders,

authorities arrested, then 28-year-old Brian Coburger at his parents' home in Pennsylvania where he was spending Christmas break. They extradited him back to Idaho. They charged him with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. A grand jury looked over the evidence that prosecutors collected and officially indicted Brian Coburger on the charges. And the state has announced that it will be seeking a death penalty. Now, while a trial date has been set yet, we are moving towards an actual trial.

In fact, prosecutor Bill Thompson has asked for it to be set for this summer. We'll wait and see if that actually happens. But one of the central issues in this case, one of the key pieces of evidence that we have talked about extensively here on sidebar is DNA, right? Because that DNA from a knife sheath left behind at the crime scene is linked to Brian Koberger. Authorities were able to make a familial match of the DNA to Coburger's father. They did this by collecting trash from outside the Coburger's home in Pennsylvania. Then after Coburger was arrested, authorities took its cheek swab from him. The court documents reveal that the DNA recovered from the sheath is an almost identical match to Coburger.

Well, now the defense may have been given a win. Maybe. Let me bring in Jules Epstein, Edward D. Allbound, Professor of Law at Temple University Easley School of Law, our resident evidence expert here on sidebar. So good to see you. I think this is going to be the last one that I say, happy new year. I've said it, it's already, what is it? It's already in the middle of January, but I'm going to give you my final happy new year.

Happy New Year, sir. And back to you, and hopefully a great new year for everybody. I hope so, too. So I'm happy to talk to you about this because let me just give everybody a preamble here. We know that Koeberger's defense team for months. months has been asking the prosecution to turn over DNA records, the materials that were held by the FBI and this private lab, Othram, that apparently performed the DNA tests in the case. The prosecution fought back on this saying they didn't have access to the records because they

were in the custody of the FBI. They said they never saw them. And they even requested a protective order. The judge in this case, Judge John Judge, that's his name, reviewed the materials and he has ordered the prosecution that they have to turn over to the defense some DNA records about investigative genetic genealogy used in the case, again, namely how the material was entered into a public genealogy database. The court said the court has now completed its review of the information provided by the state

and orders the state to discover to the defense a portion of the IGG information. With all of that, what do you think? It may be much ado about nothing. Let me try and tell you why. What you called familial DNA searching is a means to an end. In other words, it's an investigation. And so it's a tool. And if you find some DNA at a crime scene and you run it through the database and it doesn't hit on an individual,

you next expand the search criteria, so to speak. Is it close to anybody? Okay, it's close to dad. Well, we know dad wasn't there. Who's dad related to? Son, and then as you put it, they got the confirmatory DNA. So this is a complaint about how did you get me, not am I the guy? If I'm correct on that, unless there are other DNA records that raise problems,

The issues are not what will the jury hear, because juries don't normally hear about your dad's DNA or your cousins in the database or whatever. The issue is, can I, the defendant, challenge that in some way? You violated my privacy or my family's privacy, or the privacy of other people, or you violated some state law because one or two states ban familiality. searching. I don't believe that to be the case in this state. So the problem Brian will face, assuming I'm correct, is that his privacy rights are not really violated when you're looking in a database and finding his father's DNA. So I'm not sure where they're going to go with this. The only other thing I can think of is sort of a garbage in, garbage out argument that they got the wrong information in this intergenerational search, that that somehow polluted everything else. But to me, it doesn't answer once you arrest him and you take that cheek swab and you match it to the sheath.

how we got there is not, to me, a significant trial issue. By the way, talking about complicated legal issues in the Coburg or criminal case, I've got to say, even in personal injury cases like lawsuits, which you would think are relatively straightforward, they can be really complicated. And that's aside from the fact that it's also incredibly scary if you get hurt, knowing what to do next, where to turn. It's not so simple.

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They also have 4,000 support staff that can help you through all aspects of the process too, which is just incredible to think about. And if you're concerned about price, you only pay them if you will. win. There's no upfront fee. So if you're injured and you want to join the over 3 million people that call them every year, you can submit a claim at 4thepeople.com slash LC sidebar or by dialing pound law. That's pound 529 on your phone. All right. Let's get back into it with Brian Koberger. So if, for example, we had a situation and the way that I understand it is that the use of the DNA was not the end all be all, as you said, that they used that to arrest them. It was a tool that

they then used to further investigate him. And we know the evidence about everything else. If it comes out that that was used as the sole way to arrest him or the sole rationale to arrest him, could that be a legal issue? Is that the concern, one of the concerns from the defense that this was the end all be all, that it wasn't just a tool, that it was used more than the prosecution is claiming right now. Let's first start there if that's going to be an issue for Brian for Brian Coburger to exploit.

Okay. It's certainly an issue for the defense to look at. I'm not sure there's much law that supports it. Okay.

Again, let me give you an analogy. Suppose somebody just called the police and said, yo, there's a father in Pennsylvania

check their DNA and they check their DNA. However they got to dad, That's not something Ryan can complain about because his personal rights were not violated. So that unless there's a state law that says anyone who's affected by a familial DNA search has what we call standing, the right to say, hey, I can object to this. I'm not sure where it goes. Is there an argument I haven't been made familiar with, possibly?

I can tell you that having researched this in the last 24 hours to refresh my memory on familial DNA after I got your kind invitation. There are, as I said, only a couple of states that limited by law. Well, first of all, you're not combing through the Brian Koberger documents on a regular basis. without me even saying anything. First, big surprise there, but more importantly than that, just the way that I understand it, the FBI constructed this family tree through IGG, through investigative genetic genealogy. And then the FBI then sent that tip to local law enforcement about Brian Coburger. That's when they got the trash. And the defense wants to know specific details about how law enforcement used IGG to identify Coburger as the suspect, which we just talked

about. But it seems they may also want to know about testing that was done on other male DNA found at the scene. So now we're talking about potential other suspects that may have been overlooked by law enforcement. The fact that now the judge has handed over this material to the defense, whether it's a win or not, it's definitely beneficial for them because now they have the materials to go through. It's a small win for them, I guess, in that sense. But the idea of now maybe using it to point the finger at somebody else? Should we expect that? There are two things you can do with evidence like that.

If there's some other person's DNA at the scene, A, to the extent the police did not follow up, you have an argument of a flawed or incomplete investigation. And there's actually a U.S. Supreme Court case that says there's a right for the defense to say, wait a minute, you didn't check everything. Needless to say, if we can identify the source, say it's Jules Epstein, and it turns out Jules Epstein has a pattern of break-ins or something, it could lead the defense to say we have an alternative suspect. So it's alternative suspect and or inadequate investigation based on what you're telling me. And to be clear, also, the reason we're speculating a little bit about what the defense has or what they're going to do with it is because in the order from the judge, it says, quote, the specific material to be provided is set forth in a sealed order to protect the privacy of the IGG information, including individuals on the family tree.

Walk me through what the concern is there. Is it giving away the methodologies of this, of law enforcement? Is it also protecting who on the family tree? Walk us through why there's privacy. here. Well, maybe it's just that in that family tree, there's cousin Jesse and cousin Jules who don't want to be known as the relatives of Brian. So the judge is saying, okay, I got that. I'm going to give you the information, but I'm either going to white out the names of Jesse and Jules, or I'm telling you defense lawyers, you can't disclose that further because Jesse and Jules have their

own privacy interests, and I'm trying to balance Ryan's needs to create, or not create, to present a defense and third-party privacy. That's what I took that to mean. And to be clear also about why there's so much talk about the DNA, because I've made this argument before, I think it is such a strong piece of evidence. Some would say the linchpin of the whole case, some have said the smoking gun of the case, just to put a bow on this, the analysis on that knife sheet, it shows how unique the protein sequences are. So the National Institute of Justice has said, quote, a collection of these can give nearly irrefutable evidence

statistically of a person's identity because the likelihood of two unrelated people having the same number of repeated sequences in these regions becomes increasingly small as more regions are analyzed. And in the prosecution's filing in this case, they say, quote, The STR profile is at least 5.37 octillion times more likely to be seen if the defendant is the source than if an unrelated individual randomly selected from the general population is the source. And I have said this before, but I always looked at the Jerry Burns case in Iowa, which we covered here on Long Cried Crime. This guy was convicted of murdering Michelle Martinko back in the 1970s, a cold case for decades. There was no eyewitnesses. There was no surveillance.

There was no text messages. There was no GPS data. They took prime scene DNA blood, compared it to data from a genealogical database that got a pool of people, including burns. They then collected a straw. He discarded at a restaurant, and the DNA on the straw was consistent with the blood on Martinko's dress. They were able to match his DNA. Now, this is a little bit different, right? I mean, I've interviewed other experts about this before, and they said, well, the DNA that's on the knife sheath,

may not be as strong as, for example, the Martinko case because you might not be dealing with something like blood. Walk me through, if we can, Jules, the strength of this DNA on the knife sheath and how big of a role it's going to play and how much the defense can actually question its accuracy. There are a couple of possibilities. One, as they say, they're wrong. Number two, as they say, it's somehow contaminated. Number three, innocent touch evidence. I go to a store. I pick up this knife sheet. Oh, this is interesting. I'm not going to buy it. Okay. I'm not suggesting the strength of any of those arguments. But the flip side is of all the knife sheets that happen to be found at the crime scene is one that you just happen to touch at a knife store where we also know you're driving around that night and so on. and so forth, it seems to me to be a tremendously powerful piece of circumstantial evidence, assuming the DNA analysis was done well.

I mean, I've said it, the idea here that, out of all places, not only had, out of all the knife sheets, forget about the DNA not on the doorknob, the DNA not on the carpet, the DNA not, those could be explained away, right? I'm not saying his DNA is there, but, you know, it's not like we're talking about his DNA on all these places in the house because it was a party house. People went there. Out of all places, it's on the knife sheath. What seems to be the housing for the potential murder weapon, even though it hasn't been recovered, it just is such a powerful piece of evidence. And I can understand why the defense wants to question in any which way.

So we'll see. We'll see where this goes. I think the defense has been quite creative in their defenses. and so I'm going to be eager to see what comes from it. But Jules Epstein, thank you so much for coming on. Always appreciate your insight. I wanted to get your perspective on this. Thank you again.

Thank you for all that you do on giving such great in-depth coverage. Have a great day. Always appreciate that. Thanks, Jules. All right, everybody, that is all we have to be right now here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jesse Weber.

I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this long crime series ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.