Murder In Moscow: Bryan Kohberger Attempts To Get DNA Evidence Tossed

The dispute centered on Bryan Kohberger’s defense effort to obtain and potentially suppress DNA evidence connected to the knife sheath found beside Madison Mogen’s body. Kohberger’s attorneys had repeatedly demanded the underlying genetic material and investigative records used by law enforcement, particularly information connected to investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, that had helped investigators develop Kohberger as a suspect. Judge John Judge ordered prosecutors to submit the disputed DNA material to the court for an in-camera review, with a December 1, 2023 deadline, so he could determine what information the defense was legally entitled to receive. The defense argued that it needed access to the material to examine how investigators arrived at Kohberger, test the reliability of the genetic work and determine whether constitutional or discovery violations had occurred during the investigation.

The possibility of getting the DNA evidence thrown out depended on whether Kohberger’s lawyers could show that investigators had obtained or used it unlawfully rather than simply demonstrating that the IGG process had helped point police toward him. Even if the defense successfully challenged portions of the genealogy investigation, prosecutors had a separate and much stronger evidentiary step: after Kohberger’s arrest, investigators obtained a direct DNA sample from him and reported that it matched the male DNA recovered from the sheath. That meant the defense faced a difficult task in trying to suppress the final DNA comparison, because prosecutors could argue that the direct match was supported independently of the genealogy work. The fight therefore became about far more than the statistical strength of the sheath DNA; it was about whether the investigative path that led police to Kohberger had been conducted lawfully and whether any violation was serious enough to keep one of the prosecution’s most important pieces of evidence away from a jury.



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