Kohberger’s attorneys are saying they’ll present evidence that he was elsewhere when the killings occurred.
“Evidence corroborating Mr. Kohberger being at a location other than the King Road address will be disclosed pursuant to discovery and evidentiary rules as well as statutory requirements,” attorney Anne Taylor wrote in a Tuesday court filing.
Tuesday’s filing was focused on Kohberger’s alibi.
“A defendant’s denial of the charges against him does not constitute an alibi, but as soon as he offers evidence that he was at some place other than where the crime of which he is charged was committed, he is raising the alibi defense,” the filing states.
“It is anticipated this evidence may be offered by way of cross-examination of witnesses produced by the State as well as calling expert witnesses,” the filing states.
Huh? If any of us had an alibi for a murder investigation we would immediately tell that to law enforcement so they wouldn’t arrest us rather than sitting in jail for several months for the trial to announce an alibi.
Thanks for the explanations! Now my next question: The defense says they’ll establish alibis by cross-examination, which I understand, and expert witnesses, which I don’t. What kind of experts would you need to establish an alibi?
All I can guess is that they’re going to try to get their expert witnesses to place the defendant elsewhere based on cell signal data, or some similar analysis. That seems pretty thin to me, however; I don’t see how it could do more than undermine the signal data portion of the prosecution’s case. The article in question points out that the filing makes no claim as to where the defendant might have been.
Of course, the article additionally notes that his attorneys have floated the idea in a filing that someone in law enforcement planted the defendant’s DNA on the knife sheath. That has a whiff of desperation to it; I suspect they don’t have a lot to work with.
What if your alibi for murder is that you were dealing heroin in front of an ATM on the other side of town? I mean sure, drug dealing isn’t as bad as murder, but wouldn’t you at least consider waiting it out in the hopes the evidence proves inadequate even without your self-incriminating alibi?
Or what if, like many Americans, you are convinced the criminal justice system is beyond merely unjust and is in fact outright corrupt, and you fear that if you provide the police with an alibi ahead of trial, that will just give the prosecution more time to come up with “evidence” to undermine it?
Okay, I went Googling for the relevant rules of criminal procedure in Idaho, and this is the rule governing pretrial discovery for both prosecution and defendant.
Of course in Moscow fucking Idaho, the idea that the crooked clueless local cops would find somebody, anybody, to blame this on to get the worldwide media glare off themselves is simply inconceivable. Except in Amerika where it’s standard procedure.
Like OJ, I suspect Kohberger really did it. Like OJ, I fully expect he’ll be framed for the crime in addition to any legit evidence these bozos didn’t contaminate or destroy in the first 6 hours. Unlike OJ, the law-and-order-uber-alles jury will convict.
Sure, there’s plenty of corruption to go around. However, in the course of two filings, we have the defense attorneys saying that they will rely on cross-examining prosecution witnesses and on expert witnesses to establish an alibi, and we find them preemptively suggesting that evidence “could” have been planted. There’s also the slight oddity of the defendant remaining silent, rather than entering a plea; I don’t see a tactical benefit to forcing the judge to enter a “not guilty” plea on your behalf, but I don’t know if the defendant was just being uncooperative or if he was advised to to this for some reason.
Regardless of the character of the local cops, the combination of these factors just suggests to me that the defense attorneys are not holding a strong hand.
I think OJ really was framed by actual corrupt cops (despite the fact that he almost certainly did it, and if they hadn’t framed him, they probably would have been able to get an honest conviction). That doesn’t mean that every time the defense says “He was framed! The cops are crooked!” that they’re right.
So, it appears that they are not going with the alibi defense just yet. They motioned for dismissal. Here is a link to a local (to me) news story about it, text not video article, and here is a link to the actual documents filed with the court to dismiss. PDF, 23 pages long
If you skip down to the conclusion of the motion, they are asking the court to disregard 150 years of interpretation or application of certain laws in multiple states and claim that all those years, the laws were wrongly and unconstitutionally applied.
Whereas my brief reading on the subject places it somewhere around “uncommon”. It happens enough that courts have a consistent rule for it, but it’s not the usual way things go. (I submit that court videos on YouTube may be biased toward showing unusual cases.) My point is that the result, from a legal standpoint, appears to be the same as entering a “not guilty” plea–court rules say that if the defendant refuses to enter a plea, the judge enters a “not guilty” plea on their behalf, and that is what happened.
In terms of court proceedings, it does not seem to offer any tactical advantage. The trial will proceed as if the defendant had entered the plea, and it doesn’t take any plea bargain options of the table, as the plea can be changed later. If counsel wanted more time to discuss and plan before entering a plea, they could have requested that and at least had a chance of getting it.
My guess is that the defendant is being recalcitrant, and his lawyer is trying to put a good face on it–which means she’s dealing with a difficult client in addition to everything else. The only other outside chance I can see is that it might be part of a plan to manipulate public opinion somehow farther down the line. In that case, I don’t think it has much chance of benefiting him.