Bryan Kohberger, the suspect of the murder of four University of Idaho students last November, was identified driving across the country and was taken into custody. Reportedly he was pulled over twice, once for speeding and once for following too closely to a car in front of him. Whether this is a coincidence or a conspiracy, Denver Criminal Defense Attorney, Jeffrey Wolf, doesn’t think that can be concluded based on the little information we have thus far from law enforcement. In rural jurisdictions, Wolf iterates that it’s not uncommon to be pulled over for the aforementioned reasons, but he does think it is unusual that someone who knows they’re potentially being investigated for murdering four people, that they’d be more cautious & careful to abide by the rules of the road. As Wolf puts it, “this is a guy who thinks he’s smarter than he is, based on his own behavior.”
Is Bryan Kohberger carrying out odd activities in a Pennsylvania prison to think he can plead insanity? According to Jeffrey Wolf, attorney at Wolf Law, “the insanity defense has been eviscerated across the country almost uniformly.” In law school, students learn a lot of theories and common law and things that may no longer be active in the criminal justice system today. Bryan Kohberger had a criminology course on his master’s degree, so Wolf’s guess is that Kohberger learned a lot about the insanity defense but didn’t realize that once he gets out of school and reads case law, he’ll see that’s not really how it works. Wolf thinks “he’s got a pretty rude awakening coming his way”, once Kohberger gets transferred to Idaho assuming he meets with a public defender there as he did in Pennsylvania. Idaho got rid of its insanity defense back in the 1980s.
Investigators used genetic genealogy websites to link Bryan Kohberger to the murder of four Idaho students. His DNA was found in the trash left outside his family home in Pennsylvania. If DNA is to be valued as evidence, Jeffrey Wolf from Wolf Law says “we need to make sure that our DNA is private” because eventually those not involved in law enforcement will get their hands on it, like private companies, to use the DNA as they see fit. Websites like AncestryDNA, 23andMe, and FamilyTreeDNA, are the wave of the future but still are very dangerous. Privacy advocates are not involved in these websites, and the government simply is not talking about it and Wolf thinks it’s something we should definitely be talking about.
