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Newly unsealed documents reveal his former defense team told the court he was struggling to process major rulings and assess the consequences before his guilty plea.
Bryan Kohberger’s own attorneys raised concerns about his ability to “rationally understand” his murder case and its possible outcomes before he pleaded guilty to killing four University of Idaho students, newly unsealed court records reveal.
Kohberger admitted murdering Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin in July 2025, accepting four consecutive life sentences without parole and another 10 years in a deal that spared him the death penalty. But he is now trying to withdraw that plea, claiming his former lawyers pressured him into falsely confessing, withheld potentially exculpatory evidence and misled him about what accepting the deal would mean.
According to documents filed in his effort to remove Judge Steven Hippler from the case, Kohberger’s lawyers had already warned the court in May 2025 that he was having difficulty comprehending adverse rulings and understanding how they affected the case as a whole. His current attorney, Greg Rauch, said the defense had sought additional time to investigate Kohberger’s ability to make consequential decisions and obtain expert help communicating with him about whether to resolve the case before trial. That request was denied. Rauch stresses that the filing is intended to support allegations of judicial bias, not to claim Kohberger was legally incompetent.
The revelations could nevertheless become important ammunition in Kohberger’s extraordinary attempt to undo the deal. He has since publicly declared his innocence, insisting “justice was not served,” while Hippler has scheduled a status conference for June 3, 2027, followed by an evidentiary hearing on June 17. The question is no longer simply why Kohberger pleaded guilty. His new lawyers are putting what the judge knew about the decision-making process before that plea directly under the microscope.
Hot Take: Apparently the criminology PhD student had trouble understanding his own murder case. There’s an irony in there so large it probably needs its own evidentiary hearing.
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The disgraced Hollywood producer is due back in court Wednesday after being convicted for a second time of sexually assaulting former production assistant Miriam Haley.
Harvey Weinstein returns to a Manhattan courtroom Wednesday for sentencing over the 2006 sexual assault of former television production assistant Miriam Haley, with the 74-year-old facing as much as 25 years behind bars.
Weinstein was originally sentenced to 23 years in 2020 after convictions involving Haley and aspiring actress Jessica Mann, but New York’s highest court overturned the verdicts in 2024 after finding that he had not received a fair trial. Prosecutors tried him again in 2025, securing another conviction involving Haley while jurors acquitted him of a separate charge involving former model Kaja Sokola and deadlocked over Mann’s allegation. A further trial on the Mann charge also ended without a verdict in May, and prosecutors eventually abandoned it after Mann said she could not endure another trial.
Haley is expected to deliver a victim impact statement before sentencing, while Weinstein is also expected to address the court. His legal problems are not finished in California either. His rape conviction there survived appeal, but his 16-year sentence was overturned and must be imposed again, potentially leaving two states deciding how the remainder of Weinstein’s life behind bars will unfold.
Hot Take: Harvey Weinstein has now had more retrials, resentencings and second chances than most defendants could dream of. Somehow, they keep ending with him heading back to prison.
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His lawyers argue money inherited from Carl Reiner cannot be withheld under California’s Slayer Statute because Nick is not accused of killing his grandfather.
Nick Reiner is fighting for access to at least $325,000 inherited from his grandfather Carl Reiner as he awaits trial for allegedly murdering his parents, filmmaker Rob Reiner and producer Michele Singer Reiner.
His attorneys argue the money should be separated from the wider family trust because it came directly from Carl, who died at 98 in 2020, and was transferred into Nick’s trust account in December 2024. California’s Slayer Statute generally prevents killers from profiting from the estates of their victims, but the defense says it cannot apply to money inherited from a grandfather Nick is obviously not accused of harming. His lawyers have separately argued that at least $558,000 became payable when Nick turned 30 in 2023.
The dispute forms part of a wider battle over a trust worth roughly $1.6 million, with Reiner arguing that money already belonging to him should be available to help finance his criminal defense. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder over his parents’ December 2025 deaths, and prosecutors have already taken the death penalty off the table. A hearing over the trust dispute is scheduled for October 23.
Hot Take: Grandpa Carl died five years before Rob and Michele were murdered, which makes this a wonderfully strange legal argument: you can’t slay someone who was already dead.
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The attorney general is fighting orders requiring DOJ to begin reviewing documents it previously left untranslated under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has asked a federal appeals court to halt an order forcing the Justice Department to begin reviewing and producing foreign-language records from its enormous collection of Jeffrey Epstein files.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered DOJ in June to begin dealing with those documents and followed up on September 16 with a September 24 deadline to start the process and report back to the court. Blanche is appealing both orders, arguing that journalist and attorney Katie Phang had no legal right to bring the lawsuit because Congress did not include a private right of action when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Sullivan has temporarily paused the deadline while the request for a stay is considered.
DOJ says allowing Sullivan’s orders to take effect could irreversibly change the status quo and potentially make its appeal pointless. The department is challenging only the portion concerning foreign-language material, but the dispute strikes directly at one of the remaining holes in the Epstein releases: records that were gathered by the government but were not fully reviewed because they were written in languages investigators had not processed.
Hot Take: DOJ collected the foreign-language files, didn’t properly review them, and is now fighting a judge who says it should. Apparently “lost in translation” is also a litigation strategy.
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Attorney Ed Paltzik says targeting Michael Desronvil after he refused to join 11 other jurors threatens the independence of juries and amounts to constitutional retaliation.
The battle over Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has become increasingly personal, with an attorney for lone holdout juror Michael Desronvil blasting defense lawyer Kevin Reddington’s attempt to have his client investigated as “Looney Tunes” and a “full-frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution.”
Desronvil was the only member of the 12-person jury unwilling to find Clancy not criminally responsible for strangling her children, Cora, Dawson and Callan. Reddington has asked the court to investigate allegations involving Desronvil’s cellphone use, answers on his jury questionnaire and statements made when Judge William Sullivan questioned jurors during the deadlock. Paltzik argues that allowing attorneys to pursue holdouts after an unfavorable result would create a dangerous precedent, asking how Clancy’s supporters would react if prosecutors investigated a lone juror who had prevented an 11-1 guilty verdict.
Desronvil maintains that he believed Clancy was criminally responsible and denies accusations from fellow jurors that he refused to follow the law. Since the mistrial, he says he has been doxxed and had details of his personal and legal history circulated publicly. Prosecutors have yet to announce whether they will retry Clancy, while a hearing next week will consider the increasingly aggressive defense effort to end the case altogether.
Hot Take: Reddington couldn’t get the holdout kicked off the jury, so now he wants him investigated. At this rate, disagreeing with Kevin Reddington is going to require legal representation.
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Authorities will reveal a possible connection between a mysterious 1982 cyanide suicide in Boise and one of America’s most infamous unsolved mass poisonings.
A 44-year-old mystery could collide with an even bigger one Wednesday when Idaho authorities reveal a possible connection between the unidentified “Unknown Wanderer” and the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, with the “Wanderer” once also linked to a possible series of unsolved priest murders.
The unidentified man was found dead beneath a pew inside Boise’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church on December 4, 1982, just months after seven people around Chicago were killed by Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules deliberately laced with potassium cyanide. Idaho investigators concluded the man had also died from cyanide poisoning. He left a typed note, $1,900 for his funeral and the name “Wm. L. Toomey,” but his real identity has remained unknown ever since.
Ada County officials have disclosed almost nothing about the suspected Tylenol connection ahead of Wednesday’s 10 a.m. Mountain Time press conference. The sheriff, a cold-case detective and representatives of Unsolved Mysteries, which featured the Unknown Wanderer in 1990, are expected to participate. The Tylenol murders themselves have officially remained unsolved for more than four decades.
Hot Take: An unidentified man dies from cyanide in an Idaho church months after somebody murders seven people with cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago. Forty-four years later, police suddenly call a press conference alongside Unsolved Mysteries. Yeah, we’re clearing Wednesday morning’s schedule.
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