A convicted serial killer who admitted under oath to stabbing four University of Idaho students to death has been granted a chance to withdraw his guilty plea and fight for a new trial — another crack at a system that already spared him the firing squad.
Bryan Kohberger, 31, copped to the 2022 murders of Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Kaylee Goncalves in a deal that landed him four consecutive life sentences without parole. He answered yes every time a judge asked whether he committed the killings. Now he claims his own lawyers bullied him into the plea — and Idaho Judge Steve Hippler has scheduled both a status conference and an evidentiary hearing for June 2027 to sort it out.
Kohberger filed a handwritten affidavit claiming his defense team used "coercion, disinformation, false promises, and the withholding of exculpatory discovery" to force his hand, according to a legal petition obtained by the New York Times. He says lawyers fabricated horror stories about "an actual 8X8 death row cell" to scare him into pleading guilty on July 2, 2025. He also claims they buried evidence — specifically what he calls "clumps of unknown hair found in Ethan Chapin's hands."
The New York Post reported the details of Kohberger's claims in full, including his self-diagnosed litany of psychiatric ailments and his assertion that his family was also misled. CNN, by contrast, buried the substance — running a brief wire noting only that Kohberger blamed his plea on "threats," "false promises" and wrong information, without detailing any of his specific allegations or the families' opposition.
And that opposition matters. The families of Goncalves and Kernodle fought the original plea deal because it denied them the answers a full trial would have provided. Now Kohberger is using the very system that was supposed to deliver finality to drag them back through it — all while he waives nothing and the families get dragged along for the ride.
The same week, another convicted killer tried the same maneuver. The Maryland Supreme Court declined to hear DC sniper Lee Boyd Malvo's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea to six counts of first-degree murder, as WTOP reported. Malvo, who was 17 when he and John Allen Muhammad killed 10 people and terrorized the Washington area for three weeks in 2002, had argued that Maryland's failure to transport him from Virginia for an in-person resentencing hearing meant his convictions should be vacated. The court said no. Former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler put it plainly: "Looks like Malvo has exhausted all of his Maryland sentencing appeal options."
Two killers, two different outcomes — but the same machinery grinding away. Kohberger gets his hearing. Malvo doesn't. The thread connecting them: a legal system that gives convicted murderers endless procedural avenues while ordinary Americans caught in its gears get nothing.
January 6 defendants have rotted in solitary for years over misdemeanor trespassing charges. Americans convicted under mandatory minimums serve every day of sentences no judge thought was just — and no handwritten affidavit gets them a hearing. The political class built a two-tiered justice system. They just never intended to be in the tier that gets crushed.
The question isn't whether Kohberger's claims have legal merit. The question is why a man who admitted four murders under oath gets another shot at the system — and a kid caught with a bag of powder doesn't.
