Bryan Kohberger’s team convinced a judge to move his trial to a new location. Now, they’re looking to buy themselves more time and strike the death penalty.

Mr. Kohberger, a former criminal justice Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University at Pullman, Washington, is currently facing one burglary charge and four murder charges. Thanks to DNA from the button snap of a knife, he was connected to the murders of Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.

The four students were stabbed to death in an off-campus house at Moscow, Idaho, in November 2022. Nearly two years later, Kohberger has yet to face a jury – and his team is hoping to delay the trial even longer.

During Mr. Kohberger’s latest appearance in a Boise, Idaho, court on Thursday, Judge Steven Hippler spoke with both the prosecution and the defense about issues with potential trial dates.

The former presiding judge, Judge John Judge, planned to have the trial run next year to August 29 from June 2. According to Judge Hippler, though, this time frame could prove difficult for potential jurors – particularly parents – since it would cover the whole summer.

Judge Hippler proposed the beginning of May or the start of September as potential solutions. The prosecution stated their preference for May. The defense, however, pushed for September.

“During the course of this case, we had an expert that we were working with, and that expert passed away,” defense attorney Anne Taylor explained as part of their reasoning.

In addition, Mrs. Taylor cited concerns over having enough time to go through all the evidence at hand.

“Since August, we have received about 398 gigabytes of new information, and I can tell the court that nobody on our team has read every bit of that yet,” she said. “So there’s a vast amount of discovery to continue to go through.”

Judge Hippler’s response was seemingly unsympathetic to this specific reasoning for a September start date.

“I mean I understand there’s a lot of evidence,” Judge Hippler said. “But May is not tomorrow. May is many months away.”

Judge Hippler expressed his desire to keep this trial on track but agreed to meet with the defense, alone, for further discussion after the hearing.

“I think you will find I’m probably more inclined to hear things more quickly than you’re perhaps accustomed to,” Judge Hippler said.

As it stands, Mr. Kohberger could face the death penalty if convicted. But his team wants to change that despite claiming his innocence. Earlier this month, they filed a motion to strike the death penalty from the case “on the grounds that Idaho’s statutory and constitutional guarantee to a speedy trial prevents effective assistance of counsel in death penalty cases.” Included in their reasoning is their claim that “a capital case cannot be prepared in ten months.”

Will their request to scrap the death penalty be honored if they do, in fact, have more than ten months to prepare, though? It worth noting that moving the trial start date to September would effectively give Mr. Kohberger’s team about 11 months to ready themselves.

It’s unclear if Judge Hippler will be swayed, but the former presiding judge for the case was convinced to meet one of Kohberger’s other requests when he allowed the trial to be moved out of Moscow, Idaho – where the murders were committed.

Judge Judge permitted the change of venue to Boise given issues of “personnel and space” as well as abundant “sensationalized and prejudicial” media coverage that could affect the jury pool. He called it “probably, professionally, the most difficult decision [he’s] ever had to make.”