As part of his defense team’s effort to have the death penalty taken off the table before his trial in the killing of four University of Idaho students, lawyers for suspect Bryan Kohberger want to bring in a forensics expert with a record of taking a new look at old cases that had previously been considered solved.
Dr. Barbara C. Wolf, a forensic pathologist, played a role in other high-profile cases ranging from the O.J. Simpson murder trial to the identification of victims dumped in mass graves in Croatia and Bosnia. In the Simpson case, she served as a defense expert alongside other prominent forensic pathologists.
She is the medical examiner of Florida’s 5th and 24th districts, which cover Citrus, Hernando, Lake, Marion, Seminole and Sumter counties.
In 1991, she helped reinvestigate the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was exhumed decades after his death, according to her website. In 1995, she reviewed the deaths of five New York babies believed to have died from sudden infant death syndrome between 1965 and 1971. And her investigation helped lead to the conviction of their mother for suffocating all of them.
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Boise Judge Steven Hippler granted her permission to offer expert testimony remotely from her home in Florida ahead of next month’s hearing, despite opposition from prosecutors who said she shouldn’t be able to testify at all.
They asked to have her testimony excluded, arguing in court documents that “testimony containing conclusions of law by an expert witness is generally inadmissible.”
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Kohberger is accused of stabbing Xana Kernodle, 20, Ethan Chapin, 20, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, and Madison Mogen, 21, in their off-campus home on King Road on Nov. 13, 2022. It is just steps off the University of Idaho campus and a 10-minute drive from where Kohberger was attending Washington State University at the time in pursuit of a Ph.D. in criminology.
Police found a Ka-Bar knife sheath with Kohberger’s DNA on it under Mogen’s body, according to court documents.
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Investigators said cellphone pings placed Kohberger near the house the day of the murders, and they tracked his car throughout the area. However, defense lawyers have argued that he was nowhere near the house where the killings happened and was instead driving around cold mountain roads in the dark, because he liked to “see the moon and stars.”
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Last month, the defense attacked the possibility of the death penalty on numerous grounds, ranging from “contemporary standards of decency” to an alleged violation of international law.
Defense lawyers claimed Idaho’s two legal methods of execution — lethal injection and firing squad — violate both the Eighth and 14th Amendments, and they asserted that the firing squad “was never constitutional.”
After Idaho reinstated the firing squad last year, one of the nation’s leading experts on capital punishment, Fordham Law School Professor Deborah Denno, told Fox News Digital the method is far more humane than lethal injections, which have been badly botched in recent years.
“The firing squad is the quickest, surest and most error-free and the only technique for which we have skilled and trained professionals,” she said at the time.
In fact, she added, if death row inmates were given a choice, she said she believed most would ask for a bullet rather than an injection.
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Kohberger faces four charges of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary. He’s due back in court Nov. 7, when Wolf is expected to testify remotely.
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