What Bryan Kohberger Read That Made Him File This Petition

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Let's go and talk about another case that is back in the headlines. Bryan Kohberger! A week after Bryan Kohberger...

**Robin Drake** (0:15)
This is one of my favorite graphics of yours, by the way.

**Tony Brueski** (0:17)
Well, Bryan is bored. He is.
After a week, a week after Bryan Kohberger filed a handwritten petition claiming he was tricked into confessing four times. Reporters traced his own language back to the True Crime book his defense team tried to suppress. The evidence, he says, was hidden from him, was examined by an expert his own lawyers hired. Criminal defense expert Bob Motta is with us, host of Defense Diaries, on what's actually in this filing, and the one claimed the state cannot afford to ignore. Let's start with Kohberger's petition. He says his plea was based on faulty premises that were circumnavigated by a broken plea. The exact phrase, broken plea, it's the title of a shitty book published in April of 26 by Christopher Wickham. The term clumps of hair that Kohberger cites as withheld evidence appears in no court filing, it appears in no police record, in no lab report, it appears in the book. He even used the book's language in his statement to the New York Times.
Is this petition actually built on factor? Is it built on the work of this author, Christopher Wickham, and his conjecture on it, and Kohberger is somehow confusing it as fact, or that it somehow lends him to get a trial? What's your take on what Kohberger is attempting to do here and where it may go, Bob?

**Bob Motta** (1:46)
Yeah. Obviously, I don't know.

**Tony Brueski** (1:50)
Yeah.

**Bob Motta** (1:50)
I think that Wickham claims that he had access to the police reports and files. I mean, whether he did or he didn't, I have no idea. But what I do know is that Bryan Kohberger stood in front of a judge and in front of the families of those four victims and said, yes, I did the things that they're saying that I did, and I'm waiving my appellate rights, which creates a massive mountain for this guy to climb in order for him to get a new trial.
Does that mean that it's an impossibility? No.
He's basically leaning into the one way that it could happen, which is my lawyer fucked me. My lawyer didn't tell me about this evidence. I went in and made a plea agreement not knowing that this evidence existed, so it wasn't knowingly. I didn't have knowledge of those things. How can that be a knowing plea agreement when there's, in my estimation, exculpatory evidence that exists out there?
Here's his problem.
At this point, he's basically broken privilege, so ultimately what's going to happen, and it depends. I get the sense that Ann Taylor is a defense attorney's defense attorney, and the one thing that we hold sacred is defense attorneys above all else is that our clients' privilege. We're not going to disclose what they tell us. If we destroy that privilege by just turning around and spilling state secrets or our clients' secrets in this fashion, then that goes away and then the bedrock of defense work no longer exists. But Ann Taylor is going to have the opportunity to say, you know, this is where it really lays. This is what's actually going on. This is what the evidence actually said. This is what I told Bryan Kohberger.
Personally, I don't think it's going anywhere. I see a lot of people out there, well, I hope he gets a new trial. That way he can get the death penalty. They can kill him. I mean, my position has always been, you're seeing it in real time with him, sniveling and whining about how the other inmates are constantly torturing his ass through the vents. There ain't nothing worse than living your entire life in a box, baby. I'm telling you, the death penalty is the easy way out. You have this guy living in a box for 40, 50 years just getting psychologically rewarded by the other inmates. Tony's man, I don't give a shit if he gets three squares a day. You're living in a box. Everything that we take for granted every day of our lives on the outside as human beings is all lost. It's all gone. You are living in a box for the rest of your life. Ultimately, if your question is, do I think this thing is going to prevail? No, I don't. I don't think you'll get a new trial off of it. Do I think that it can be litigated? Yes. I think that they will try to litigate it. I think I saw that he was appointed attorneys, I believe. So they're going to take a run at it. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you know how impossible and difficult it is to undo the conviction in this country. Well, when you're the guy standing in open court and admitting to doing it, it's even harder.