In Defense of High-Profile Crime Cases

As some regular readers know, I used to be a rather avid true-crime podcast listener. I followed several dozen podcasts and am still interested in the long-form ones that cover a particular crime in depth, and at one time even did some fieldwork for a book about true crime podcasts I was planning to write. I had long BART rides and bicycle rides during which I listened to these things nonstop. Then, personal calamity and world events took over and life changed course somewhat, but I kept the materials even though my horror of real-world stuff put me off the genre. This is not a complaint–many people who produce true crime shows are solid, ethical journalists who want not only to report the truth, but also to bring about closure or correct miscarriages of justice. I just can’t stomach tragedy nearly as much as I used to. But once in a while I do get captivated by legal proceedings in a high-profile case.

Such is my interest in Bryan Kohberger’s trial for the murder of four University of Idaho students. As I think I’ve posted before, much of the pretrial action is under seal, which frustrates the journalists and podcasters to no end, but once in a while the judge releases a nugget or two. Anyway, today we learned of a judicial decision on the defense’s motion to suppress the DNA found on a knife sheath at the crime scene. For those who are not following the case, this is the only piece of forensic evidence that links Kohberger directly to the crime, and it was obtained through familial DNA analysis and a genealogy website. I didn’t think the motion had a chance, and was therefore not surprised that the court denied the motion. Here is the reasoning:

[A]pplying well-settled principles of Fourth Amendment, the Court finds no constitutional violation. First, Defendant abandoned any privacy interest in his DNA by disclaiming knowledge or ownership of the sheath from which the DNA was extracted. Second, even if no such abandonment occurred, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in DNA found at a crime scene which is subsequently analyzed to identify an unknown suspect.

This makes sense to me, except for one possible wrinkle. There’s a 1968 case called Simmons v. CALinks to an external site., where a defendant sought to suppress a suitcase on Fourth Amendment grounds. For the motion to suppress, the defendant claimed standing in the suitcase, and this later came back to bite him at trial when he disavowed the suitcase. The court said: “[W]e find it intolerable that one constitutional right [the 5th Amendment privilege against self incrimination] should have to be surrendered in order to assert another [the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures]. We therefore hold that, when a defendant testifies in support of a motion to suppress evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, his testimony may not thereafter be admitted against him at trial on the issue of guilt unless he makes no objection.”

In other words, had Kohberger made a valid 4th Amendment argument against the admission of the sheath DNA, it shouldn’t have mattered if he said, for the purpose of the motion, “this is my knife sheath” or “this is my DNA.” He would still be allowed to disavow both the sheath and the DNA at trial. But the second rationale of the motion denial still stands: anything discarded at a crime scene is fair game. 

This motion, and others in the case, redeem to some extent my interest in these high-profile cases. Because the attorneys on both sides in these cases tend to be very thorough, and know that the eyes of millions of people are on them, they put in a lot of effort to file motions, argue, and mine evidence and logic that remains invisible in other cases. Often one hears of new forensic technologies through these cases that have not yet been employed in a lot of other scenarios. If it weren’t for the Golden State Killer and Bryan Kohberger, I wouldn’t know that the use of genetic genealogy had entered the mainstream of policing (or maybe it’s still cutting edge), nor would I think that the standing issue would find so little purchase with the court. I plan to keep following this case, as I think it’ll be interesting from both a criminal procedure and an evidence angle.