Bryan Kohberger’s lawyers issued a statement this week, scolding their own expert witness for allegedly violating. a. confidentiality agreement.
Public defender Anne Taylor, Elisa Massoth, and Bicka Barlow said that statements made by Brent Turvey fall “outsisde of the ethical and legal normas that are applied to experts in legal cases.”
Kohberger pleaded guilty last year to the murders of four University of Idaho students at their off-campus home and was sentenced to life in prison. The guilty plea meant Kohberger, a former criminology student at Washington State University, avoided the death penalty.
The convicted murderer’s attorneys hired Turvey “solely to provide an opinion about the crime scene, nothing else,” the attorneys wrote in the statement, according to the Idaho Statesman. “The agreement with Mr. Turvey was crystal clear that all materials, as well as any opinions that he developed as an expert, were to be kept confidential.”
The statement further says that Turvey has not been released from that agreement and is now speaking out on topics “outside of his areas of expertise.”
The Statesman said that Turvey provided it with a previously unreleased photo of an evidence bag, saying it showed the chain of custody for a particular piece of evidence was insufficient.
Turvey told the Statesman on Tuesday that everything he’s spoken about has been released by prosecutors, calling the attorneys’ claims a “deflection” from serious issues with the case.
“The bottom line is, in my 30 years I’ve never divulged confidential or case-sensitive material that was outside my realm, or outside my anything,” Turvey said. “Nothing that I shared was not already public, or at least provided in discovery that was actually data-dumped by law enforcement in Idaho.”
“This is an extraordinary case with extraordinary types of exculpatory evidence that were not being brought to light,” he added, saying that Taylor and her team should be specific rather than making vague comments.
Featured image: Bryan Kohberger/Ada County Sheriff’s Office
