Murder In Moscow: Bryan Kohberger And His 4th Amendment Rights

Authorities built part of the case against Bryan Kohberger through a combination of cell-site location information, surveillance footage, and DNA evidence, and the legal argument presented at the time was that investigators had obtained that evidence without violating the Fourth Amendment. Police had Kohberger’s phone number from an earlier traffic stop and later obtained warrants for his historical cellular records. The initial warrant covered a limited period surrounding the murders, and investigators subsequently obtained authorization for a much broader range of records after reviewing the first set of data. Those records indicated that Kohberger’s phone had connected to towers serving the area around the King Road residence on multiple occasions before the killings. On the night of the murders, the phone appeared to move away from Pullman before it stopped communicating with the cellular network for roughly two hours and then reappeared south of Moscow. Investigators argued that the phone data, when compared with surveillance footage of a white Hyundai Elantra traveling through the region, helped establish a timeline of Kohberger’s alleged movements. Because investigators had obtained search warrants for the historical location information, the process was described as consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision, which imposed greater Fourth Amendment protections on long-term cell-site location records.


The DNA portion of the investigation was also described as constitutionally permissible. Investigators had recovered male DNA from the button snap of the knife sheath found beside one of the victims and later used genetic genealogy techniques to help narrow their search. In December 2022, Pennsylvania authorities collected garbage that had been placed outside the Kohberger family residence and compared DNA recovered from that trash with the sheath profile. Testing indicated that the DNA from the garbage was overwhelmingly consistent with having come from the biological father of the man whose DNA had been found on the sheath, strengthening investigators’ focus on Kohberger. The Fourth Amendment argument rested heavily on the Supreme Court’s California v. Greenwood decision, which had established that police generally did not need a warrant to search garbage left outside a residence for collection because a person no longer retained a reasonable expectation of privacy in it. Taken together, the phone records, vehicle surveillance and DNA work were presented as evidence obtained through established constitutional procedures rather than unlawful searches, with the resulting information helping investigators establish probable cause for Kohberger’s arrest.



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