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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. How the hell did his DNA end up on that sheath at that murder scene if it wasn't his sheath? All we hear about are the pings, the pings. Brian Koberger, the alleged, was pinging everywhere. It's a bad idea to have your cell phone with you when you commit a crime.
This isn't a whodunit, and I don't have to prove to you why he done it. This is The Idaho Massacre, a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. Season 2, Episode 6, Pings and DNA Admissibility. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker and Gabe Castillo.
At the center of the prosecution's case against accused murderer Brian Koberger are records tied to his cell phone and DNA that allegedly places him at the scene of the crime. The defense has called foul on both areas of evidence.
Investigators now say they harvested DNA from an empty leather knife sheath. Police say that DNA matched DNA from Koberger's father, which they collected from trash outside the family's Pennsylvania home. Does the government now have genealogy info that previously was controlled by individuals and private organizations? And how accurate is this database?
The genealogy sites that allows police to search public records of people who have opted in saying, hey, if there's a murderer or rapist in my family, I don't mind if you use my DNA to try to find them. Here's Stephanie.
We have to remember, DNA is a big ticket item for the prosecution. And just as a quick refresh, we know that, quote, a hit of Brian Koberger's DNA was found on a knife sheath left behind at the crime scene. And we also know that investigators connected that through familial DNA. Brian Koberger's parents' house was under surveillance in the days leading up to his arrest.
His dad, we have to assume, tosses his trash in the garbage cans outside their home and then investigators retrieve it. And from that trash, they're able to identify dad's DNA and put that into a database. And boom, there's a familial match. Now, look, this has been highly debated, as some say that the search and seizure of Koberger's family trash is questionable.
In the course of researching this season, the team at KT Studios came across an article called How DNA and Cell Phone Evidence in Idaho Murders Complied with the Fourth Amendment. To get clarity on this pivotal information, I reached out to the article's author, Collie Stimson, who has singular expertise in both areas. Hi, Courtney. It's Collie Stimson from the Heritage Foundation. Collie, how are you?
I'm great. Excellent. And your article was, it seemed just so on point with so many pertinent matters. I guess just to start, would you just let listeners know your name and your background?
Sure. My name is Cully Stimpson. I'm a senior legal fellow and manager of the National Security Law Program at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to that, I served in the Navy JAG Corps, which is the lawyer corps of the Navy, and served as a prosecutor and defense lawyer. When I was a prosecutor in the Navy, I tried a bunch of violent crimes, including a case that involved DNA. It was one of the few cases that the Navy had used DNA in early on. This is the 92, 3, 4, 5 period of time. And I worked as a homicide prosecutor in Maryland.
And I tried the first PCR case. What's PCR? So it's a type of testing of genetic material. So when you used to have blood testing, you're either A, B, or O.
and those are broad categories of blood type. Then when we started using genetics, you had to have a large amount of genetic material, stuff left at a crime scene. But because the law is always behind technology, lags way behind it, the genetic labs were now using
The next level, the next more sophisticated level, which required much less material called PCR, polychromes reaction. By the way, when I was a Maryland homicide prosecutor, I was the head of attorney training in the office, which included training on how to use DNA in cases. And when I was an instructor at the Naval Justice School for five years, I taught the whole JAG Corps how to use forensic DNA.
And of course, now we're so confident that we have 23andMe or did Ancestry.com and all the rest of it. And so tens of millions of people rely on that genetic material to find close and distant relatives all around the world. You've been with DNA since the very, very beginning.
Well, I'm actually made of DNA like you. So, yeah, I think from the very beginning. But I've had the opportunity to work with it. And as a defense attorney, I fought against it like any good defense attorney and tried to poke holes, not in the scientific reliability, because I think that's a losing battle, but in whether it was collected correctly, whether testing procedures were done correctly, whether there is an adulterated sample. That's really where the game is as a defense counsel.
I asked Kali how he thinks DNA and its collection will play out in this case during trial, as well as his general thoughts on the accused. I mean, it's interesting. Look what he's studying. He's getting his Ph.D. in criminal justice. I don't know what he's read and I don't know what his course requirements are. If I was the prosecutor, I'd be pulling every book he ever had to read and every syllabus to find out.
and look for things about alibi and forensic evidence. And I would want to get into the guy's head by seeing what he has studied and what he's writing. But I don't think that, for example, the questions about the way the evidence was collected at his parents' house back in Pennsylvania is an issue at all. I mean, once you discard something, it's not yours anymore. You've abandoned it. And as a Fourth Amendment principal, you've abandoned any Fourth Amendment standing to complain that, you know, somebody picked up my cigarette butt that I tossed on the ground. Somebody
He rifled through the trash out in front of my house. Well, you gave it up, so you don't have a right to complain. And it's his parents' house, so he doesn't even live there anymore. He's an emancipated man, so he doesn't have a standing to complain about his parents throwing stuff away in their house. So he has a double negative there. He had no standing if he threw it away to himself, and he certainly doesn't have any standing if his parents threw it away.
Can I have you slow that down for one second? So what prompted you to write this article, you know, about how the evidence complies with the Fourth Amendment and what is the Fourth Amendment? The Fourth Amendment is part of the original Bill of Rights, which were passed, you know, a few years after the Constitution was signed.
and ratified by the states and it essentially in so far as this is related says that the government may not engage in unreasonable searches and seizures of your person's places or things or papers all right
And so for the government to get into your stuff, to see your stuff, typically they at the very least have to have probable cause to believe that you are the person that committed a crime and that if they look into your stuff by getting a warrant that's very specific as to location of what they're looking for, signed by a judge, a neutral detached magistrate, the government can then look into your stuff.
got into your house, look in the drawer, look in the closet for the knife, the gun, the rope, whatever you used for a crime. I was very interested in the development of Fourth Amendment law through the Supreme Court because there was a case that the court had recently come down with called Carpenter against the United States in a throwaway line that Justice Gorsuch said, where he, I think, made
made a mistake suggesting that people would have a Fourth Amendment right to genetic material that is on third-party genetics hosting sites. If I spit into a vial and give it to Ancestry.com and I have a contract with them to do so, I pay them a fee, they send me and only me my results back. If I then want to keep it private, that's it. No one gets to see what the results are. But if I want to take the extraordinary step
of then providing that material, those test results to a third party genetics website, it's like putting it in the trash can. It's like hanging it outside my front porch for everyone to see because you sign a contract that says, this is out there for the world to see 'cause I want the world to see who I'm related to so they can see that they're related to me.
And so when this case came along, I was reading the articles about it, and I thought they're clearly clueless about this because they were suggesting, oh, it's a violation of his Fourth Amendment right because they went through the trash. Oh, it's a violation of this. So I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Slow down, everybody. And the Kohlberger case is poking along now, and it's getting closer to trial time. And more and more people are sort of interested in the mechanics of the trial. But I suspect the closer we get to trial, people will be more interested in the DNA and the difference between the SNP DNA genetics testing piece
which they did for the trash, and then the regular forensic testing for admissibility into court. And so the closer we get to trial and the more that gets litigated, I'm sure people want to know in English what all that means.
Yeah. And is there a way to break those things down? There's two types of forensic tests. What forensic means is used for criminal court. So just sort of file that away. Anytime you hear forensic and then a word after it, it means for criminal trial. So forensic DNA profiles, typically you find genetic material at a crime scene. You don't know who did it. You post it into...
the FBI's DNA database looking for a hit. And in the best case scenario, somebody has already provided their DNA because they're law enforcement or military or their prior criminal and they've taken their DNA. You get a hit and then you test the chances of it being somebody else's DNA. And then you come up with a result.
Here, when they found the sheath that held the knife that the subject used to slay the poor college kids, they tested the sheath and they found genetic material. That probably means epithelial cells, cells that are found, believe it or not, in the sweat that comes off your fingertip. So everything you're touching, you're leaving a little part of your DNA on it.
I mean, you can't even see it, right? So whoever the dude or dudette is that killed these people left a sheath there. They test the sheath, and they were smart because instead of just using one test and hoping that they'd get a random hit through the FBI DNA database called CODIS, C-O-D-I-S, they also had a brain.
Because CODIS only tests, and I don't want to use scientific jargon, but let's just say five or six or seven, just a handful of what are called genetic markers. So you've seen the corkscrew DNA nucleotide, the thing that looks like a winding staircase. But back in seventh grade.
- Right, and so imagine that as that corkscrew is going down and down and down, there's the stairs. It tests six or seven or eight stairs at different points in the DNA corkscrew. SNPs is different. SNPs are, it's an acronym, it stands for single nucleotide polymorphism. And so imagine what they're doing there is they're looking at 30 or 40 or 50 of those stairs.
And that's just to see what variations there are in sequences on somebody else's double helix to see if there's a relationship between the person who left the DNA and somebody else. It's not used forensically in court. It's just think of it as the Ancestry.com part of genetic testing. And so they tested, in my opinion, it hasn't been made public yet, they clearly tested
the standard forensic testing, the standard DNA testing, probably PCR. And then they did SNP testing, most likely, because when they connected the dots between his cell phone and his parents' location, and he was registered at his parents' house, et cetera,
And they went to the trash and got the parents' trash and tested some of the trash. Kohlberger had been visiting his mommy and daddy. And sure enough, on the trash, they find through SNP technology, a person who was 99.9999%
Think of it as chance of being his dad. So in other words, it's his dad. It's the dad of the person who left the genetic material on the sheath. So if you remember, I Love Lucy, when Ricky Ricardo said, Lucy, you got some splaining to do. Kohlberger doesn't have to do any splaining because he's the defendant.
He has a right to remain silent, but it looks really bad for him because how the hell did his DNA end up on that sheath in that bedroom at that murder scene if it wasn't his sheath? And if it was his sheath, why was it there? And he doesn't have to say anything. He can stand on his right to remain silent, and that remains his right throughout the trial.
Just going back to what you said, how you did training in the prosecutor's office and then also in JAG, was a lot of acceptance of DNA as something reliable? Was it just teaching the presentation and helping people understand it on a really basic level so it didn't seem like magic and so people could understand?
Well, it's a complicated question with a somewhat easy answer. You don't have to become a genetics expert as a prosecutor or defense counsel or judge to use DNA as a forensic matter in a criminal trial. But what you have to do to be good at
either using it for or against your case, is to understand collection protocols, testing procedures and protocols, areas where samples can get mixed up with other samples. And so just like with any other forensic techniques that are used, you have to get good at understanding the basics of the science and then get really good at understanding how you get from A to Z, getting into court and then
either defending its use or poking holes at its reliability. That's where the lion's share of the work is done these days. Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment.
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After getting a better understanding of the DNA in this case, we decided to dig a little deeper into the technology of the cell towers. Here's Stephanie.
There has been so much back and forth over the phone pings because again, this is going to be a big ticket item. It sounds like for sure the accused Brian Koberger was out and about a whole lot that fateful morning, both before and after the murders. Investigators claim that they have phone pings that place Koberger near the house the morning of the murders. And Koberger's defense team is arguing that he was nowhere near the house when the murders happened.
What is so interesting here is that the same data that the prosecution is going to use to place Koberger at the scene is the exact same data that the defense is going to use to dispute that. I reached out to Scott Green, founder of Great Scott Enterprises. For nearly 40 years, he's been collecting, analyzing, and helping to explain complex electronic evidence.
I collect the data, I analyze the data, I make sense of the data, and then I present the data in court either to a jury or to the judge. What we wanted to speak with you about is the cell phone data.
And all we hear about are the pings, the pings. Brian Koberger, the alleged, was pinging everywhere. Can you please explain what are cell phone pings or signals and how specific are they?
So a ping in the way it's been used in the media, and I read the articles with regards to cell phones and towers, is a connection between a cell phone and a tower. Those connections fall into three different categories generally. They are
are a phone call that would ping off a tower or connect to a tower and they're referred to as pings. So they occur when somebody makes a phone call, they occur when somebody uses data, and they occur when somebody sends a standard SMS or text message. As far as how specific a ping is, the tower knows the direction that the cell phone is from the tower. So what you get out of the ping and out of the cell phone
A carrier is a direction from the tower, generally in a pie-shaped area that shows the direction from the tower that the cell phone is. And when you have them moving through space and time, you can get an idea as to where the cell phone is going and how fast it's moving and some things like that. You can get some estimates out of that. But you don't get an exact position out of the cell phone carrier information.
What I understood as you described it was that the pings happen when something active is occurring, a call, a text, or using data. These pings also happen passively. I have my phone here right now. Is this pinging?
Cell phones and towers are communicating most of the time, usually because there's data transactions between the cell phone and the tower. That could be updates, it could be email getting updated, or inbound or outbound data of some sort. Understood. So in this case, the accused Koberger wouldn't have had to have been actively on his phone to ping. It could be something in the background. Is that correct? It could be something in the background that is generating those pings.
True. I know you said direction and potential trajectory. And does the radius depend upon how far apart the towers are? So basically, could they spot me in my car within a two block radius or is it a two mile radius? Ah, so that's a great question. In the country, outside of cities, in rural areas, the cell phones transmit a much longer distance than they do inside of cities.
So it depends where you are as far as how far a cell tower will transmit. In Moscow, Idaho, it's not in the country. It certainly is in no way in a big city, but there's two colleges right nearby because I would imagine colleges would need more power. So here's an interesting thing. I drove past the University of Arizona yesterday, and one of the things that I noticed is that there are...
are a tremendous number of 5G towers around a university. In the country where the accused was driving, there's probably a lot fewer. What's the distance between those two locations? Somebody said 10 minutes. 10 miles. About 10 miles. So in the country, you're going to find that cell phone towers can be miles apart and cover miles in both directions.
from a cell phone tower. They vary in direction based upon geography and where people are and how the cell phone carrier wants to cover the area. This isn't specifically a technical question, so we can skip over it if you want, but the accused is a criminology PhD student
Is it surprising to you that if what's alleged is true, that he had his phone on him the whole time? I mean, even I know that my phone will leave a footprint. It is surprising to me that someone with that background would have their phone with them. Agree. I would think somebody who has some intelligence about...
criminal backgrounds and criminology would probably at that level at least know that it's a bad idea to have your cell phone with you when you commit a crime.
Yeah, it's just so incongruous. As a PhD candidate, Koberger was also a teacher's assistant at Pullman Washington State University. And we spoke with one of his students and she's not wrong. That's one of the things that gives her pause on the alleged guilt is it's 101 to not do that.
How frequently do pings update? Is it a standard amount of time? Does it depend situationally? Wow, it depends. Pings get updated differently based upon which one of those three items is going on. You're going to see every time there is a text message sent, you can see a connection to a tower. And every time a cell phone call is initiated or the cell phone changes towers,
or the call ends, one of those three things when it's a phone call, you'll see a different tower recorded by the cell phone carrier. Does that make sense? It does make sense. As a real example here, a white sedan that the prosecution alleges is Koberger's. It was seen passing by the victim's residence at 3.29. That same white vehicle at 4.04 and at 4.20 is seen leaving the area at high speed.
Can officials attempt to corroborate, we see the car and then go and check the tower to see if that lines up? So are you asking me if the law enforcement at the time can go do that or look back in history? Go back in history. As a layman, I would want to think, oh, can I corroborate that with cell tower information?
You can corroborate the location of the cell phone. If it was in the car, you would be able to say, okay, it's in the car and it's moving or it's in the car and stationary. If the cell phone is on and communicating with the tower. Because in this case, we see that the cell phone is connected at his home at 2.42 a.m., right? And then at 2.47, so five minutes later, it's moving and then gets turned off.
And then it gets turned back on, 448 south of Moscow, Idaho on State Highway 95. In between that, if I understand the timeline and what's listed here, the cell phone is off. So it's not talking to the towers at all.
Interestingly, the car is a Kia, right? It's a Hyundai Elantra. A Hyundai Elantra. Okay, same company. Hyundai and Kia are the same company. So I wonder if they took that car apart and looked for cell phone signals coming out of that because a lot of cars nowadays have cell phones built into them and they're constantly communicating.
Without knowing the specifics of Koberger's car, was it common for cars to be emitting signals? A lot of cars in that timeframe were starting to have cell phones built into them. One of the things that happens in our world is that a lot of devices are following us around. And when those devices connect to things, they get recorded.
One of the things that has happened in our world, and you'll notice this on Google Maps, you'll notice this in other things that are used to track us through space and time. Wi-Fi signals have been collected by Google as part of what they did when they were mapping our world. And so you will see when you...
are navigating your car and you turn on Google Maps, it will say, if you want to have a better navigation experience or something along those lines, turn on Wi-Fi. And the reason why it uses that is now it's seeing Wi-Fi connections that are from homes that it passes by or businesses that it passes by. And it adds that to the mix. Not only is GPS very accurate, but it adds the Wi-Fi signal to the mix.
to track the vehicle or the phone and display them out. If a phone "stops reporting to the network," does that mean for 100% that the phone was turned off, or could there be another explanation? If a phone stops talking to the network,
It could be a host of things. It could be a distance problem out in the forest somewhere under a rock or inside a cave or something like that. However, for the most part, a cell phone not communicating with a tower is generally evidence that the cell phone is turned off or in airplane mode.
Here is my last two questions that I have. And I took an Uber the other day and I was at the back of a grocery store and my Uber driver called me and he said, "I need you to come to the front of the store. That's where I'm going to be." So, and I opened my Uber and I could see myself walking just from the front to the back of one store. Why do we have that level of specificity for an Uber, but not here?
So a lot of apps, navigation apps, Uber, Lyft, use GPS data, which is a much more accurate signal to place you at a particular place. GPS is much more accurate than these cell phone pings. Much more accurate. Why is GPS much more accurate than cell phone pings?
Cell phone pings will give you an area, this pie-shaped area, where the cell phone is located. GPS data can narrow that down to within feet. So a cell phone sector, is what they're technically called, a pie-shaped area, could be many square miles. A GPS location is going to generally be within feet.
And I guess it is that GPS is that specific because that's its intention. Whereas cell phone towers are intended to what allow our phones to communicate, right? But not to track us. So cell phone towers and they're broken up into sectors so that the number of connections can be managed.
GPS data is more specific so that you can navigate. You can be in a particular place and say, I want to go to this other place, and it's going to navigate you within, generally within feet. Looking forward to trial. So the defense and prosecution, to our knowledge, they have, to the public knowledge, there is the same, the same data exists.
How are two different experts going to read the same information and from there draw different conclusions? Okay. So a little piece of this that you can look at, one is ZX and the other is Cellhawk. Those are two different products that both map where a cell phone is. As far as this guy, who's their cell phone expert?
Cy Ray is the founder of ZX Corporation. Yeah. And he's the guy that's going to testify, we think? Yes. The defense has said he will testify to corroborate Koberger's alibi and say that he was not at the residence because he was too far south. We have two hours.
roughly between the cell phone being connected in his home and the cell phone being connected south of Moscow, Idaho. It's difficult for an expert to say that the phone wasn't somewhere if it was off. So we have two data points that are two hours apart. It's difficult for any expert in either direction, prosecution or defense, to prove or disprove where that cell phone is in those two hours.
how are you going to prove that? You can't prove a negative. You can't. So they could say, yeah, it's possible that between 247 and 448 in the morning that he made it over
over to this home and murdered people. But that's a lot of time in between, a lot of time. I don't see the defense and prosecution being very far apart in their testimony because they are looking at the same data. And the lack of data between 247 and 448 is just a lack of data. It's going to be difficult for either side to prove anything in that time frame.
It's so obvious what you said and I don't know how it hadn't occurred. Of course, there's a dearth. There is no information. Dearth is a perfect word to use. There's nothing. There's nothing. So the timeline shows that there is no data from the cell phone carrier between 2:47 and 4:48 in the morning. How do you think the cell phone evidence will be received by a jury or how do you feel cell phone evidence in general is received by juries?
As a person who presents cell phone evidence all the time, younger juries are very receptive to cell phone evidence. They use their phones all the time. They know that they're a computer they carry around in their pocket or on their hip or in their purse. There certainly can be older members of the jury that have a harder time understanding that. Sometimes I run into older judges that have a hard time understanding what that really means.
Let's stop here for another break. We'll be back in a moment.
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I continued my conversation with Cully Stimson about how he predicts the cell phone data and DNA evidence will be presented at court, beginning with the process from finding DNA at a crime scene to tying it to a potential murder suspect and how that ultimately is presented during trial.
In some murder cases, the motive is dead clear, no pun intended. He wanted her. She didn't want him. She rejected him. We get that. Two drug dealers go at each other over turf. One kills the other. We get that. These are harder cases because here's a dude who lives in a different state. He had no prior relationship that we know of with any one of these people. The government doesn't have to prove motive.
But everyone in the courtroom is sitting there, and I can tell you I've been there. Why did he do this? And I want to state to you right here and now, I don't have to prove motive. Motive is not an element of any of these crimes. And so when my colleague stands up on the defense and suggests what's the motive, that's an interesting question, but we're not here to resolve that. We're here to resolve whether he committed this crime and whether I've proven beyond a reasonable doubt each and every element of
… of the offense to which he's been charged. This isn't a whodunit.
And I don't have to prove to you why he done it. That's so interesting because you hear in so many cases, motive, motive, motive, motive, but that's not. It's never an element. It's never an element. It's the smoke cloud that's drifting around the courtroom in every case like this. It's just hanging in the air. And every time I was a defense counsel, it was motive, motive, motive. They haven't proved motive. I don't know why they haven't proved motive. It's because clearly there wasn't a motive.
And I'm playing the other game. You haven't heard one ounce of evidence against my client about why he would do something. Why would an upstanding PhD candidate who has everything in front of him do something like this? It's absurd. And that's the kind of argument you're going to hear.
But it's not material. It's not an element of the offense. Murders are driven by love, lust, power, or money. Those are the big four. And then since I'm a Shakespearean, I would add greed because greed is one of them as well. I watched the proceedings in this for just a few
few minutes today in preparation to chat with you. And it seemed like the prosecutor is sort of a no-nonsense older fella who's just doing his job. And it seems like this public defender is doing what she can with a really tough case. And clearly at this point, Kohlberger still wants his trial. I wouldn't be surprised if he changes his mind. I would not be surprised if he changes his mind because I would suspect behind the scenes, this public defender is going to the prosecutor and going, okay, what can we do here?
My guy's willing to do this, you know, plead to this if you're willing to cap confinement at this. He wants to be able to see, you know, sunshine before he's dead. And if I was the government, depending on the strength of the evidence, and I don't know the evidence, nor do you, we only know what we've read, I might say, yeah, I'm
I'm willing to discuss, in theory, a plea. Of course, the families are going to have a say in that, depending on what the state victim rights statute says. There's a lot of green between the ball and the cup here. You know, oftentimes you take your best shot during pretrial motions when you're the defense counsel, and depending on how they turn out, then you can go back to your client and go, look, you know, we're 0 for 5. It's looking real bad for you. More than happy to defend you. You know I'm a fighter. I don't know what the state law allows.
allows for. But in the federal system and in some states, you get a break on sentencing if you plead guilty. And the opposite is true. If you go to trial, the judge, one of the factors is that you're not getting punished for going to trial, but you don't get a break for pleading guilty. Oh, interesting. Yeah. They can't increase the punishment
Because you exercised your right to have a trial. But if you plead guilty, they can give you a break for pleading guilty and not expending court time. Right. Because, I mean, this case, if what I read just the other day is accurate, it's already up over three million dollars.
Which is a drop in the bucket for a big jurisdiction. But for a little tiny jurisdiction like where they are, they haven't ever seen a case like this in the history of that county. And so for a little county like this that doesn't have a lot of crime, to have a big case like this with cell site location information and DNA and all the rest of it with national attention, they're going to go through some money. But justice shouldn't have a cost to it. The thing about murder cases is somebody did it.
Somebody did it, and justice requires accountability in a murder case, and it's the ultimate case because in a situation like this where they were perfectly innocent, helpless young people with their whole lives in front of them, but for victims who are children and babies, these are the most sympathetic types of victims. And so there is no reason for the government to give
the defendant an inch if they have a solid case. I mean, people have been collecting DNA for a long time. So it would seem like unless you're really messing up on the collection, then if your DNA is on the sheath, guess what? You're probably there. How does the defense counter this?
There can be other innocent explanations for the presence of a person's DNA at a crime scene other than the fact that they're the perp. And so you could – I mean I have asked myself and I have seen in my courtrooms when I was a judge or a prosecutor, defense counsel saying, well, okay, you're saying that the defendant's DNA was found in this barracks room in the Navy. Yes, it was. And isn't the fact that these study groups study in their rooms? Yes, it is.
So you can't disprove that my client, the defendant, wasn't in the victim's room as part of a study group, can you? Well, no, I can't, not from a forensic standpoint. So you're trying to create reasonable doubt, which is your job as the defense counsel. And there are oftentimes innocent explanations for the presence of someone's DNA in
at his crime scene. Now, are there innocent explanations for the DNA of Brian Kohlberger found on the knife sheath, on the bloody bedsheets of an apartment in a different state? I have a very, very, very hard time wrapping my head around how you
create reasonable doubt to explain the presence of his DNA at a murder scene in a different state in a kid's apartment. So that's a big hurdle for this defense counsel. And of course, so instead of attacking that, they're going after the cell site location information, and they're putting up an alibi defense. If you have an alibi defense, you're required to
to notify the government of your alibi within a certain period of time before the trial and then give specifics of what your alibi is because the government can then try to go poke holes and find out if there's any holes in your alibi defense. And we'll see how the defense plays out, but
It seems as if they've created enough wiggle room in this loosey-goosey alibi defense that puts him driving around at random places at random times in the middle of the night in the general location of the crime. But, of course, I'm sure their cell site location person is going to say, well, he wasn't exactly at the crime.
But the problem is this guy had been to the crime scene multiple times, according to the cell site location information. And in all the other times he was there, he didn't turn his cell phone off. And yet just coincidentally on the night of the murder, his cell phone turns off for a period of when the murders were said to have happened. And then it turns back on as he's heading back.
to his college. It just doesn't look good for him. Oftentimes in a case where you have the defendant's DNA at the scene of a crime where there's no prior relationship between the victim and the defendant, and they're complete strangers, and it's found in a very, very inconvenient place for the defendant, they end up pleading guilty. Because when you're the defense counsel and you get that information and you understand what it means, you finally have the come to Jesus talk with your client and say, um,
Game's up. You have a right to a trial. Of course, I'll defend you, and I'll give you a great defense. Notice I didn't ask you whether you did it or not, so you can take the stand, say whatever you want. However, from my experience, there is no reasonable explanation of why your DNA is there except for the fact that you did it. I don't think the government's going to have a hard time proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you did it. And most defendants who are in that situation are going to be like, okay. And so they try to get the best deal they can.
I mean, it seems like they're going full bore. The problem is that, of course, go on the record, this guy's presumed innocent, unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by legal incompetent evidence. He enjoys that presumption of innocence through the entire trial. That said, the evidence is overwhelming as we've seen it to this date.
for guilt because not only do you have the police stopping of the car and the cell site location information of him what looks to be scouting out the crime scenes but you have people who were alive who he didn't kill who said a person looked like this and they picked him out and then you have his DNA and then you have the cell site location information on the night of and you have him turning the cell phone off any two
of those pieces of evidence alone would get you close to beyond a reasonable doubt. I think the DNA alone gets them to beyond a reasonable doubt. But when you have all the other circumstantial and direct evidence, I see this case as what's called a slow plea. A slow plea is
He's just guilty. Everyone knows he's guilty, but he has a constitutional right to demand his trial, and he's going forward with the trial. And of course, he's presumed innocent. I'll say that again. But to me, this looks like a slow plea and a guy who's just not willing to accept responsibility for his actions. Maybe he'll be acquitted. I don't know. But it looks like a slow plea to me.
And so this will be a battle of the experts on the cell site location information. The government will say he went from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. He turned it off between here, and that puts him at the house on around the time of the murder. And the defense will come up and say, yeah, we can't dispute that he was there, but that could mean he was way over here in this bubble. If I was the government, I'd say, OK, let's just pretend that everything the defense expert said is true. And let's just throw out the cell site location information.
Here's all the other evidence that points out that he's guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, let's take four other pieces of evidence off. He's still guilty. Let's take nine pieces of evidence off. He's still guilty. So I wouldn't play into that. I'd fight it hard and then I would just talk about, is that reasonable? Because that's not reasonable. More on that next time.
For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at kt underscore studios. The Idaho Massacre is produced by Stephanie Leidegger, Gabriel Castillo, and me, Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design by Jeff Twaugh.
Music by Jared Aston. The Idaho Masker is a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Scott Green can be found at Evidence Solutions, Inc., headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, with experts across the country. That's EvidenceSolutions.com.
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