Bryan Kohberger Is Waiting On One Person To Speak

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
Days before Bryan Kohberger pled guilty, prosecutors handed the court a list of 180 people they might call to convict him. Newly released filings reported by Fox News put Amanda Kohberger on that list. She's his sister. She's already been named on his own defense team's mitigation list. Both sides wanted her in that courtroom. For reasons that couldn't have been more different. Within days, he took a deal and ended the case before a jury heard a word of it. Thirteen months later, he filed five handwritten pages from the Idaho Maximum Security Penitentiary, arguing that his family's involvement in his defense is the proof he was coerced into confessing. The people the state lined up against him are the people he's offering as evidence that somebody forced his hand and whether any of it works comes down to one person who isn't him and isn't the judge. Two sides signed that agreement. He got his life out of it. The four families got one thing back and it wasn't justice and it wasn't answers. It was finality.
That was the entire consideration on their side of the deal. His actual innocence is his truth, I put in air quotes. He told the New York Times three claims hold the petition up. His lawyers were in effective evidence that could have cleared him, was kept from him, and he was frightened in designing by lies about what death row in Idaho actually looks like. The mechanism he's using is real, and that needs saying upfront because a lot of the coverage is treating this like a crank letter mailed out of a cell block. Idaho Code Section 19-4901 isn't an appeal, it's a separate civil case, which is the only reason he's still standing, because he signed his appeal rights away as part of the bargain. New evidence is allowed in. He filed inside the window. A judge read that handwriting and assigned a taxpayer-funded lawyer. So the door is open. Anyone telling you this is legally impossible is simply wrong. Now, impossible and odds of it working are two very different things. But is it impossible? No.
You can hit a wall there. Once a defendant has been sentenced, Idaho requires him to show manifest injustice before court will let him take a plea back. Not regret, not a bad trade, a fundamental miscarriage proven by the man doing the asking. And that question, the case against him, is a transcript. He dictated himself under oath. He said he understood the agreement. Nobody promised him anything. Nobody forced him. Judge Stephen Hippler asked whether he was pleading guilty because he was guilty and he said yes. And he was walked through all four killings and asked whether he'd done it deliberately with premeditation. And he said yes to every single one of them. And Taylor stood next to him and told the court she consented. And the judge put one more thing on the record. He said he wanted to be certain this man had actually committed these crimes because he didn't want him pleading guilty to something he hadn't done. That judge decides whether Kohberger was lying then or is lying now. There's exactly one person alive who can get him past that transcript and isn't the public defender that he was just assigned.
That statute didn't appear out of nowhere either. Idaho put it on the books in 1967 It was sitting right there while prosecutors walked four families through what a plea would mean. Nobody stood at a microphone in Boise and mentioned that Idaho law hands a convicted man one more swing by right at public expense. They said, it can't do it. Can't what happened? Well, they didn't read the rules. The second claim is the one pulling all the oxygen and it's the one nobody is getting right. That includes the people telling you that it amounts to nothing. This petition says clumps of hair were found in Ethan Chapin's hand. That isn't the FBI's phrase. The lab called it debris. Clumps of hair comes out of a book written about this case by a retired FBI agent named Christopher Whitcomb and Kohberger pointed at that book in his Times interview as if it's some sort of evidence and not just some sort of literary abomination.
So the language is borrowed. That's not the same as saying there was nothing in his hand.
There was something in his hand. When a person is killed, their hands are bagged at autopsy, meaning they literally put bags around their hands.
All four of them. That's not a plot point. It's procedure and it's the reason it's, there's a reason it's procedure. It's that a person's hands are the last place that they can leave you anything. What they touched, what came off the man doing it to them. Those bags went to the FBI lab and this is where it gets thin. And I don't mean thin for Kohberger. The lab compared what came out of those hands against exactly one person, him. They looked for hair consistent with his head hair sample and wrote down that none of them were found. One name, one comparison, one answer. They never reported whose hair it was though. The last word that report gives is that the additional debris from Ethan Chapin's right hand was preserved for possible future comparisons. Preserved, set on a shelf, which is a polite way of saying nobody has ever established where it actually came from.