Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Bryan Kohberger’s defense spent much of the pretrial period trying to punch holes in the prosecution’s case by attacking the reliability, interpretation and admissibility of the evidence tying him to the murders. His attorneys challenged the DNA evidence recovered from the knife sheath, questioned the investigative genetic genealogy process used to help identify him, and sought to suppress evidence obtained through search warrants for his apartment, vehicle, phone and other records. They also scrutinized the state’s cell-phone analysis, arguing that tower data could not pinpoint Kohberger’s exact location, and challenged the prosecution’s timeline by focusing on gaps in the evidence surrounding his movements before and after the killings.
The defense also targeted other pillars of the state’s case, including surveillance video, eyewitness testimony and the suggestion that Kohberger had any prior connection to the victims. His lawyers argued that the prosecution was trying to turn a collection of circumstantial evidence into a single narrative without proving that each piece meant what the state claimed it did. Through motions, expert challenges and discovery fights, the defense repeatedly tried to separate the evidence into individual parts and show that each one had limitations, alternative explanations or unanswered questions. The strategy was aimed at creating reasonable doubt by arguing that the prosecution’s case looked much less definitive when every piece of evidence was examined on its own.
