Attorneys for the 29-year-old man accused of killing four University of Idaho students in 2022 have asked for his trial to be held away from the county where the murders occurred.
Attorney Anne Taylor filed a two-page petition this week arguing that a “fair and impartial jury cannot be found” in Latah County, Idaho, where the murders of Ethan Chapin, 20; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Madison Mogen, 21, took place on November 13, 2022. For more than a year, Taylor argued, residents of the area have been subjected to regular news coverage about the murders.
“A fair and impartial jury cannot be found in Latah County owing to the extensive, inflammatory pretrial publicity, allegations made about [the suspect] to the public by media that will be inadmissible at his trial, the small size of the community, the salacious nature of the alleged crimes, and the severity of the charges [the suspect] faces,” Taylor wrote. “Enlarging the jury pool will not do anything to overcome that pervasive prejudicial publicity because Latah County does not have a large enough population center to avoid the bias in the community. Further, the size of the community and the interconnectedness of its citizenry is problematic and will prevent a fair and impartial pool of potential jurors.”
Taylor requested a hearing be held to discuss a potential change in venue by the end of April 2024.
Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said during a pretrial hearing on Friday that a change of venue wouldn’t help the defendant.
“It’s not Moscow. It’s not Latah County. It’s everywhere. So, I don’t think that a change of venue is going to solve any of these problems,” Thompson said, according to ABC News. “I have people, friends in this community who have traveled to Mexico. And they say, ‘You’re from Moscow?’ And immediately, they want to talk about this case.”
The suspect, who is not being named by The Daily Wire due to a policy on accused mass killers, received a win last month in court when District Court Judge John Judge ordered prosecutors to turn over some of the genetic genealogy evidence used to link the man to the crimes.
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Prosecutors have argued that they didn’t need to turn over detailed information about how genetic genealogy was used to link the suspect to the crimes since a DNA sample provided by the suspect directly matched DNA found on a knife sheath found at the crime scene. The genetic genealogy wouldn’t be used at trial, prosecutors argued.
Once police had their suspect, they tracked him to his parents’ house in Pennsylvania and collected garbage from the trash cans outside. They obtained DNA that partially matched the DNA collected from the knife sheath, indicating they had the DNA of the suspect’s father. Collecting DNA from the suspect later directly linked him to the sheath. The sheath was found on a bed next to Goncalves and Mogen’s bodies, partially under one of them. The type of knife the sheath held would have been consistent with the knife used to murder the four victims.