Kohberger prosecutor reveals crucial moment: ‘Everything hinged on that argument'

Fox News

6 hours ago

Failure wasn't an option.
With the entire case against Bryan Kohberger on the line, an Idaho prosecutor held steady and helped convince a judge to allow controversial DNA evidence to stand – despite the FBI violating its own policy to obtain it.
Jeff Nye, chief of the criminal division at the Idaho Attorney General's Office, was the legal big gun brought in to back up Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson as Kohberger's defense threw a "kitchen sink" strategy at the court – challenging everything and hoping something would stick.
"Just pure evil is the way that I would describe him," Nye said of Kohberger. "I think it was surreal, especially going up to Latah County, you know, small courtroom, small town. When I kind of get into my groove, everything else kind of melts away. I forget kind of the external details, but then I go to sit down for my argument and I see him sitting there, and I immediately think about what he did that night and the horrible, horrible acts that he committed against these totally innocent people."
One of Nye's key contributions was overcoming the defense's challenges to investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) evidence – which the FBI used to tip investigators off to Kohberger for the first time in what was revealed to be a controversial move that the defense tried to have precluded from trial.
"It was critical," Nye told Fox News Digital. "I mean, the stakes could not have been higher in this case on that issue."
State police and the independent lab Othram had been working on IGG leads until Dec. 10, 2022, when the FBI stepped in and submitted the crime scene DNA sample to a commercial genetics database designed to help people track their family history. While technically a violation of the bureau's own internal policies and the service's terms of use, the court said the evidence could stand and knocked down Kohberger's arguments that the IGG technique had violated his Fourth Amendment rights.
Nye had argued that the policy in question "does not impose any legal limitations on otherwise lawful investigative or prosecutorial activities."
The judge on the case ultimately agreed that it had been a valid investigatory tactic.
"I struggle with the idea that DNA left at a crime scene, that there's any expectation of privacy," Idaho Judge Steven Hippler told Kohberger's lawyers in January.
The FBI previously declined to comment on the issue and instead pointed Fox News Digital to Hippler's Feb. 17 order, which found investigators had not violated Kohberger's constitutional rights and allowed the IGG evidence to remain in play.
Nye, who argued in favor of the evidence for the prosecution, revealed to Fox News Digital that it would have been "devastating" if Hippler ruled in favor of the defense.
"It would be devastating, because it wouldn't just be the DNA that goes out, the match at least, to Mr. Kohberger. It would be all of the fruit that came from that match. And that's a lot of things," he told Fox News Digital. "That's all the Cellebrite stuff, because they don't have his devices to review if they never made the identification. That's, all of his cellphone records, you know, those warrants were issued based on the identification that was made from the DNA. So all of that's gone. It would have put the state in a very bad position to move forward in this case."
The IGG argument ended up being the biggest of his career, he said – and that's coming from a Georgetown-educated prosecutor who has argued homicide cases in front of the Idaho Supreme Court.
"The other thing that made me a little bit nervous is when you're arguing Fourth Amendment issues, even if the state loses and the court finds that there was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, there are some exceptions to the exclusionary rule that the state can sometimes argue..." he said. "In my brief and an oral argument, we didn't even assert an exception to the exclusionary rule, because there just wasn't one that could apply, and so everything hinged on that argument that this did not violate the Fourth Amendment."
If he failed, prosecutors could have lost access to the IGG and any evidence derived from it or from search warrants based on it, he said.
He also had out-of-state decisions that went in the prosecution's favor, but it was the first time the controversy had come up in Idaho. He was nervous – at least before he stepped in front of the judge.
"Once you get into a back and forth with the court, or at least once I do, that kind of melts away, and I can focus on the argument," he told Fox News Digital.
Detectives said during a news briefing after Kohberger's sentencing that they believed they would still have identified the suspect if he hadn't left DNA at the scene. They had his car, and they said they would have found him eventually.
On Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger entered an off-campus house at the University of Idaho and killed Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.
He dropped a Ka-Bar knife sheath at the crime scene, near Mogen's hip. And his DNA on the snap generated the lead that brought police to the killer in December 2022. Officially called a "tip" in IGG terms, the DNA match was confirmed when police swabbed Kohberger's cheek upon his arrest at his parents' house in Pennsylvania.
After years of denying the allegations, Kohberger's defense took a major turn in July. Having failed to have the IGG thrown out or to have the potential death penalty removed ahead of trial, in large part to Nye's work on the case, Kohberger pleaded guilty.
"I wanted to hear him say that, and he finally did," Nye said. "By the time of the sentencing, I had decided myself, I'm done with him. I want nothing else to do with him. I don't care what he's thinking, I do not care what he's doing, and so I made a very conscious effort at the sentencing to not ever look at him, to not pay him any attention, and instead to focus on the victims as they gave their impact statements."
The now-convicted murderer received four consecutive sentences of life in prison with no parole – one for each of the first-degree murder charges he faced – plus another 10 years for burglary. As part of the plea deal, he waived his rights to appeal and to seek a sentence reduction.
After Idaho AG Raul Labrador took office in 2023, he promoted Nye to run the criminal division in part because of his plan to revamp how the department works with county prosecutors, offering them assistance on major cases in an about-face from policy under the prior administration, which would either take full control over cases or avoid getting involved at all.
Before the promotion, he said he led the special prosecutions unit and had a ground-level view of what smaller jurisdictions were asking for when they came to the state for help. It made sense, he said, to want to have control over a case, but he also believes that a community's ability to bring killers to justice should not be based on its population and budget.
"I personally feel pretty strongly that the state should step in in these bigger cases and offer to assist," he said. "And so that's what happened in this case."
Nye, deputy AG Madison Gourley and former deputy AG Ingrid Batey, who is now a member of the Canyon County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, all assisted on behalf of the attorney general's office.
Thompson, the Latah County prosecuting attorney, led the case. His senior deputy, Ashley Jennings, also played a major role, handling a massive discovery process and battling more of Kohberger's pretrial motions. And former U.S. Attorney Joshua D. Hurwit was commissioned as a special deputy prosecutor to assist if the case had gone to trial.