BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A choose dominated Thursday that prosecutors can pursue the dying penalty towards Bryan Kohberger if he’s convicted of murdering 4 College of Idaho college students in 2022, regardless of the defendant’s current autism analysis.
Kohberger, 30, is charged within the stabbing deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves at a rental dwelling close to campus in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022.
Prosecutors stated they supposed to hunt the dying penalty if Kohberger is convicted at his trial, which is ready to start in August.
However his attorneys requested Choose Steven Hippler to take away the dying penalty as a doable punishment, citing Kohberger’s analysis of autism spectrum dysfunction. They’ve additionally filed a number of different motions difficult the dying penalty, together with one primarily based on purported violations by the state in offering proof.
“Mr. Kohberger’s autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reduces his culpability, negates the retributive and deterrent purposes of capital punishment, and exposes him to the unacceptable risk that he will be wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death,” protection attorneys wrote in courtroom papers.
They argued that executing somebody with autism would represent merciless and weird punishment beneath the Eighth Modification to the U.S. Structure.
Prosecutors argued that beneath U.S. Supreme Courtroom precedent, the one psychological incapacity that precludes imposition of the dying penalty is an mental incapacity — and Kohberger’s analysis was of gentle autism “without accompanying intellectual . . . impairment.”
Kohberger was a prison justice graduate scholar at Washington State College, in Pullman, about 10 miles (16.1 kilometers) from Moscow, on the time of the killings in November 2022. He was arrested in Pennsylvania weeks later. Investigators stated they matched his DNA to genetic materials recovered from a knife sheath discovered on the crime scene.
Autopsies confirmed the 4 had been all seemingly asleep once they had been attacked, some had defensive wounds and every was stabbed a number of occasions.
Initially Revealed: April 24, 2025 at 6:54 PM EDT
