“If he did anything like he did to our daughter to the others, then he deserves to die,” Kristi Goncalves, mother of Kaylee Goncalves, one of the four victims of the November 2022 murders, told CBS News.
Bryan Kohberger’s defense team, at a hearing on Thursday, Nov. 7, asked a judge to remove the death penalty from the sentencing outcomes of the case.
Kohberger is accused of murdering four University of Idaho Students on Nov. 13, 2022. He was linked to the crime scene with DNA found on a knife sheath and surveillance videos, as described by CBS news.
Kohberger’s attorneys argued that the death penalty does not fit today’s “standards of decency” and that it is cruel to force inmates to sit on death row for decades.
Judge Steven Hippler, one of Ada County’s judges, challenged the defense about their justifications to convince him to remove the death penalty. Hippler claimed that both the Idaho and the U.S. Supreme courts have established capital punishment as an option underneath the law and found their arguments lacking, according to the Idaho Statesman.
Kohberger’s lead attorney claimed that Idaho did not have the means to execute a prisoner, to which Hippler countered that the state prison system has been able to obtain lethal injection drugs consistently. Another attorney said that the death penalty is applied arbitrarily.
Hippler additionally argued that the Idaho Supreme Court has found that a prisoner’s “fear and anxiety of being executed did not meet the threshold of a violation under the Eighth Amendment,” from the Idaho Statesman.
The prosecutors countered the defense, saying that the death penalty is the “law of the land” and constitutionally defensible based on precedent.
After hours of back and forth between both sides, Hippler said he would take the argument under advisement and issue a written ruling at a later date.
Steve and Kristi Goncalves have publicly supported the death penalty for Kohberger.
“I feel like he’s… helped steer that legal argument into a place where it can get resolved in a timely manner,” Steve Goncalves told the Idaho Statesman about Hippler.
Rebekah Weaver can be reached at [email protected].