IDAHO VS. KOHBERGER HEARING-RAW COURT AUDIO PART 4

this is a special report from True Crime today and the hidden Killers podcast from the hidden Killers podcast I'm Stacy Cole Brian Colberg was back in court for a hearing on a potential change of venue for his capital murder trial let's go now to the courtroom uh sorry for the uh disruption about that um but but we're going forward now okay Miss Taylor thank you you honor me I attempt to share my screen yes all right Dr then let's talk about Community attitude survey what does that mean um well it's a survey designed to estimate opinions and experiences in Greater populations which in this case are the perspective jurors in Lal count is there a specific way you set up to do a survey yeah yes of course can you tell us about it sure so a lot of the design and structure of these surveys is based on some of the guidelines professional guidelines from apore which is the American Association of public opinion research and the ASC which is the American Society of trial consultants and also 40 Years of people doing this um so the way it works is there's a we randomly select people through a random digit dialing approach so it's a probability sample everybody has a known chance of being included and the first section is a screener to assess to make sure people are jury eligible so we have to live in the county um have a driver's license or be registered to vote the 18 and over and so on um and then they're introduced to the survey um there's an introduction actually at the beginning even before they answer a question or they're told why to they called we're calling to get their opinion about an upcoming trial um and that their opinions are important because they were selected as a representative you know household or whatever in the community um and then after they go through that screening process they're instructed that there's no right or wrong answers to any the questions they can always report that they have no opinion or they don't know and everything will remain anonymous so the first few questions try to measures just basic criminal justice attitudes to get them familiar with the process familiar with the survey answering questions and then they're introduced to the actual case read a case recognition question um and then if they know about the case they continue and are ask prejudgment questions um open-ended questions to assessor some key opinions um then uh case Knowledge Questions which are recognition questions and then they go into the demographic section which is you how they consume media and yes you mentioned um two organizations and I think earlier you mentioned that you were regularly a member of those organizations do they um help set standards for how survey should take place they do and tell me a little bit more about the introduction why do you do that uh the the first introduction or the instruction after that they get to a skin SC the introduction and then the instruction yes well well you're trying to encourage people to participate to increase response rates right so you're told again why you're calling it's not a sales call we're we're calling to get the opinions of people in your community and why so it's not just random so they understand it's about an upcoming trial we don't tell them what trial because that would clearly be the potential response bias and they're encouraged to continue participating because we they represent their Community they were selected randomly and then there efforts to increase response rates by we do call backs so everybody uh each number is called up to three times at different times of the day um so if somebody maybe is at work you still have a chance of being included in the survey um there's soft conversion techniques so somebody's kind of on the fence like maybe they they're like maybe I'm busy can you call me back we try to find out when can we call you back so we can talk to them later just to encourage them to participate and not drop off so all of that stuff is has done to increase response rates as best we can um and that's all starts with the introduction and then the follow-up introduction or instruction kind of a similar it explains there's no right or wrong answers they don't have to not forced to say yes or no they can say no opinion I don't know they can refuse to answer the question all of those things can they answer some questions and not others if that's what they want to do absolutely that's called a refusal so they might say I don't feel comfortable answering that question I'm not going to answer that all right um so you did a community attitude surve in this case did you only look at lakea County no what counties did you look at so we looked at four different counties overall so we looked at Ada County banet County Canyon County and way talking I'm going to talk to you a little bit later about the three comparative counties but for now can you walk us through your highlevel findings for Lop County and County sure so I think high level you can see case recognition is very high and it's pretty much it's also high in Ada count it's 93% there it's almost everyone in the L talk County 98% which is similar to what I saw in the George Floyd case where it was 99% so this is extremely high you they're pretty much the same um and it's not just a passing familiarity with the case it's not that they recognize it but don't know much you can see people in Le County reported that they follow the case somewhat or very closely almost 70% are closely following this case and again that means they're actively looking for information passively consuming information talking about it so it's a big deal in this community um and there's a presumption of guilt the burden has shifted so 67% believe Brian cober is guilty of murder and 25% reported that they definitely he's definitely guilty so these are strong opinions um and 51% reported what I call a fixed opinion where they reported that cober would have a difficult time convincing them that he's not guilty so the burden of proof is shifted on the defendant to prove his innocence and that's undermines due process that's not how our system is designed to work and also on the question of of sentence you can see that 52% believe that he should be S to when I look at this slide and I look at the prejudgment of guilty of murder and I using that term right prejudgment means somebody's decided before we ever get anywhere near trial that Mr cober is guilty of murder when I look at those numbers it's higher in Ada County and it's not a secret to anybody in this room that our argument is to move this case to ad County does this seem counterintuitive when I look at the prejudgment rate and it's higher percentage wise in County yeah so first of all is it in my mind it's two questions one is should the case be moved not where it's should the case be moved has a presumption of innocence been undermined based on the reasonable likelihood standard Which is less than the preponderance of the evidence so second question is where in a case like this you're going to see high case recognition and high prej everywhere they're essentially the same in terms of 67% 68% but when you look at case recognition in size population size you'll find that in Ada County there's about 16 times more people in that county that have not prejudged if you do the back so yes those numbers look the same for those who recognize the case but there's a much larger swap of people who haven't prejudged and it's not just prejudgment that matter so that's one variable you look at but it's not just that there's a host of other things extent of case number connection Civic case um you know under like been exposed to rumors there's all these other factors that play in it's not just one item it's the totality of the findings not just one question when I move to the other slide what am I seeing on this slide so these are instances just to show how invested people in this community are um so almost 80% 79% have talked about this case in line I'm line or in person and that's where information is spread so even those who may not closely follow the news are learning about it from their neighbors from their co-workers from family from social media you know and all of that so information is being spread through those channels as well and you do see big differences there when you're looking at Ada County it's much lower because they're less invested in this case it wasn't a shocking incident that curred in their own Community um you see that 32% have watched a show for example that Netflix or Paramount show or gine or something about the case um almost 40% 39% personally experienced high levels of stress anxiety or fear during the search for the killer while they were here so that's very high and then 45% know someone else who has and if you look at those together it's actually about 63% have either personally experienced fear or know someone who has during that search and and that's that shows like the impact they had on them and you'll see it later in some of the opens where people talk about I was scared to walk out outside they're running to their car from work they don't feel safe they can see the house from their office uh but one person mentions that their wife was scared to go to the supermarket people talk about they've locked their doors for the first time so it just shows the personal fear and impact this is created in this community that you do not see in large communities I have a a followup question for you on this Slide the statistics that you show us show that the incident of looking at things on social media and Netflix and regular Prime Time news shows is higher in L County and that's that correlates to the sampling of things you showed us a few moments ago just your sample of what's out there on social media on Netflix and that sort of thing is that right it's higher in lto County it is higher in L County now when you say correlates like I didn't do a statistical analysis I would say that's the stuff the content out there that's what it looks like if you just do a search you're following and and on the anxiety question that number for eight account is about 32% so it's much lower looking at this slide what's the what does it mean with these differences we're seeing in numbers well to me again it shows personal connection the personal experience in a big County there might be a sensational crime but you don't see people feeling that way you CU crime is unfortunately frequent and they might be something else that c their attention or there's so much going on it's not shocking here this is something what people talk about again there's ideal Community where everyone felt safe and this person took it away from us it was like shattering this sense of security and safety that we had um and everybody experienced it and my guess is a lot of people can probably reflect on where they were when they learned this and how it impacted them personally so it's very unique what are we looking at on this slide um I think you skip this SL okay I this one that starts with lived or know someone who would yes okay um so again this comes back to personal connections so 78% of survey respondents either lived or know someone who lived in Moscow when the murders occurred compared to 20% in County that's not surprising because if you look at the size of Lea County it's about 32,500 people over the age of 18 compared to about 406,000 in Ada County and I think it's like 66% of Lea county is in Moscow so it's a huge percentage so it's not shocking that people were here or know somebody who was here heard um and a large number of people are students or employees at the University it's a quarter of the sample I ran across one citation where it was like 36% so it's even higher um much lower in Ada County you can see 40% % of people have visited a home or walked by it where this crime occurred and again if you look at some of the op somebody talks about seeing the house from their office window so it's a constant reminder of this awful thing that happened these are things again that jurors come into that courtroom will see it's like you indicators in the community of of what impacted that people may be fearful of of you know people know they're on the jury and all those things because it's such a small community and people are so invested and you can see that 22% of of the respondents actually work or know someone who work for a law enforcement agency involved in the investigation 22% compared to just 4% account so again direct connections to this case and those direct connections those are things that L talk County jur would bring in is that right yes and that's where we see these big differences in National cases like this this is typically what you see when the entire state is saturated with coverage everybody's going to know about it and have opinions to some degree but it doesn't necess have personal connection that's why cases like the Oklahoma City bombing case was moved that was a national case everybody knew about it but they still moved in because of the personal connections now advaned to the slide um what are we seeing on this slide well this goes back to case number so we talked earlier in the day about how case knowledge and um the impacts you prejudgment and how we have this poite perseverance so people develop these more complex schema and case knowledge they're more resistant to change you can see almost 80% of people in L County were familiar with at least five of the nine media items we tested in the survey almost 80% and 52% knew seven out of the nine or at least seven of those items so they have a lot of case knowledge here is quite High while we're here at talking about the media items did you test on every media item you could find yeah did you have to select a certain number so that you could do the survey I what I do is I read all the media covers that local those local newspapers and I'm pulling items that stand out that are repeated quite a bit so there's like multiple references certain things and things that are inadmissible prejudicial things that are likely to have pre apply us have back all right I want to talk a little bit more about how you set up the survey what are we see so this should kind of give you an indication of the flow of the survey so this is the what I call the case recognition question and it's developed by reading a lot of the coverage and seeing how the case commonly described in the language in the newspaper on TV to construct a uh case recognition item to try to trigger M so if someone answers yes to this question question 2a they then go to the prejudgment question somebody answers no we give them a little more information to see if that triggers a memory um if they if that does trigger a memory then they go to the prejudgment question and if not they go to the demographic question so we always have two case recognition questions that's the recommendation again in the asgc professional guidelines we usually pick up 1 to two% when we do that in most service does this question come after your um earlier questions to get them to take your survey the introduction and information questions yes it's actually even deeper so you get the introduction first you get why we're calling and then you go through screen of questions and then you're given an instruction about you there's no right or wrong answers you can always say I don't know I can always refuse your answers are Anonymous then they answer I think three or four General criminal justice questions and then they get to the question when you say the prejudgment question are you talking about the media items stuff is that the same thing you're talking about prejudgment is whether or not you believe a defendant's guilty or whatever the crime is this is before any of you would never put those media items and then ask if you think they're guilty because then you'll create response effects like maybe they didn't know that item and you just gave them prejudicial information and now it's now I think he's guilty because you just told me he confessed or whatever thing it is like you know want to do that is that why the survey is designed that way yes all right let's talk about some of the survey results walk us through what we're seeing here okay so again the the data suggests that this case has captured the community's attention this is not a case where people have moved on almost everyone in the community recognizes this case you're at 98% recognition rate and it's not just a passing familiarity people are closely following the case 29% are following it very closely 39% are following it somewhat closely so you're basically at 60% closely following this case which is quite High all right and what are we seeing on this slide so this is one of the ways we test the validity of our survey so we talked again when we talked about the research we know that people who closely follow a case people who have a lot of case knowledge are more likely to believe a defendant is guilty so one of the things we would expect is to find a similar relationship in our survey which indicates validity so and that's what we find so whether or not people are closely following this case is significantly related to bias so if people are very following it very closely within that group The Guilt rate is 84% and somewhat closely it's 73% just kind of looking at it combined you're at basically 77% of people who are following it somewhat or very closely believe that defendant is guilty of partner so the more you follow it the more likely you're to be exposed to prejudicial content the more likely you are to develop a complex memory and case knowledge and more likely to have all right what did you learn about prospective jurors who are talking to each other so one is the fact they are talking to each other and that's we don't always see that sometimes gets 40% 50% or even less in terms of talking about a specific case um and you can see here it's almost everyone 88% of people who know about the case have talked about it either in person or online that's quite high and they're following it seeing things on social media they're watching you know Netflix episodes or Paramon or whatever it was on they're seeing shows they're seeing it in on their in their news feeds um they're closely talking about it in a small community that's how information gets spread it's what we call this informal communication Network did you have an opportunity in your survey to learn more about different rumors and things that are going around in County I did so we asked an open-ended question after the prejudgment question and then it should be what they know about the case and their opinion and we ask what rumors or theories they've heard in the community to see if they're regurgitating some of the stuff that's been on in the newspaper on social media the idea again of informal communication Network in smaller communities you tend to get a lot of like well I knew somebody who knew this person or personal connections and information get spread that way and that's what we saw here there's a lot of references to things that you know the defendant committed a murder in Oregon like speculation no evidence of that just something they heard um that he talked about committing the perfect murder on a paper um or that he hates women and he had trouble at to University he goes to with women and people who worked with him had problems um he stopped her because he didn't she didn't respond to him um people were looking at Reddit comments or Reddit posts he had made and from years back all that kind of stuff and then references to him you know having obsession with some of the victims um ritual animal killings and these are just a couple examples like you'll see that stuff everywhere but the amount you see in Lea county is much higher like you know if you go through comments in a county you'll see you'll find some too you can find examples and I'm sure if you go to iic Canyon you're going to see them the case has gotten so much attention but not to the degree you have here and given the size of the community it's much more significant did you record and document all of these comments in the actual survey report yes okay and that's something that we've provided to the court and the state has no objection so the court can read the full scope of the rumors from Le County residents on his own time I guess yes thank you fun like read it all right um what did you learn about lto County residents that were related to Moscow specific Moscow connections well this is kind of a unique nature for this too that I see in cases like national disasters like wildfires is a good example where it's this like Collective trauma everybody goes through so you can see 76% of of residents here lived or knew someone who lived in Moscow at the time of the murders um so they have they either are here the wealth one is here and incra anxiety right so I think it was like almost 40% of students left during Thanksgiving didn't come back until because they were scared for their safety and you see that in the other questions so asking about if people experienc stress anxiety or fear during that search and you can see 39% reported that they personally did and another 45% reported that's someone they know and if you look at those called cross Tab and the question is did you or someone you know it jumps up to 63% so a large percentage of people were anxious and scared about their own personal safety or safety of someone they they know care about tell me about the open question about people's sense of security did people respond to that so one of the questions we ask is how did this crime impact your community and there and if I do this in a big County and I ask this or big big venue federal case you get a lot of it didn't or not much or you know I didn't live near it so not me or something like that you'll get a lot of that and I'm sure there's some of that here too if you look at different venues Ada County probably has a lot of that in banic um what really stood out to me was this shattering our sense of Innocence right this is an innocent town and no crimes or horrible things ever happened here and this guy took it away from us we had this idealic Safe Community and this person d destroyed it this crime destroyed it um and they talk about people you know they never locked their cars before their homes I think one person said like he didn't even have a house to his key when he bought it or a key to his house that makes more sense um and suddenly people are locking doors because they're fearful um people are scared to go to their cars um you know again someone mentioned like you could see the house from their office and students and staff would run to their car to be safe um people's Partners were scared to go to the grocery store and there were tons of comments about that this idea that we have a safe community and it's never going to be the same it's lost it's like our sense of Safety and Security this special place this tiny little place that's a bubble from the all the bad stuff in the world and then this thing happened the comments that youve depicted in this slide is that all of them or are there others for the court to take a there point I'm top of reading the other stuff to read all those OP okay I what about the connection to the the house where this what did learn well I think it's comes to like again there like direct and indirect connections to this case which makes it unique in L County which you'd all see everywhere is you know 40% of residents have who who know about the case which is pretty much everyone have either visited the home where the crime occurred or walked by it and so there is this constant reminder of this awful thing their daily wives and also you see a large percentage of people are students or employees at the University um or connected to it the investigation itself 22% were connected to the criminal investigation and then 25% were either students or employees at the University and and we know if you look at it like the university is a big employer in this community and when all of these students leave it has an impact on the economy um you know over 60% of the count is made up of people who live in Moscow um and if you look at some of the just the data it indicates about 36% of people in this County are either students or employees at the University so even higher that we saw survey all right I want to talk about the prejudgment question what did you learn so this question is one of the indicators of undermining the presumption of innocence so I look at it I'm always looking when I think about due process is the presumption of innocence and you see when it shifts to a presumption of guilt so in this case 67% of prospective jurist who recognize the case believe Brian cerg is guilty of murder and 25% have a strong opinion on that so if you think about it given the high recognition rate here you 100 jurors walked into this room during Vader 66% of them already think he's guilty before they heard any evidence and that's just the prej judgment question that's not talking about the other factors that you talked about media awareness case connection to the community things like that no that's just looking at everyone and if you start looking at things like well do they know a lot of detail that prejudgment jumps up to over 80% did they closely follow it jumps up to 70% you know whatever is so it's that's just looking at the entire start looking at other things that prejudgment gets even higher you've talked about what you defined as a fixed opinion or a fixed presumption of guilt what did you find about that yes so the question I ask is um basically based off I'm going to start talking based off of what you've read seen or heard would the defendant have a difficult time convincing you that he's not guilty so burden approv shipping on the defend um I think I mentioned this last time but that question was developed by a judge in Tennessee and what you were saying was you would they would ask yours um what do you know about the case and they would tell them some information or minimize what they know and then the question was do you think he's guilty and maybe they'd say yes and then they'd say but I can be fair and impartial I can set it aside I think I can do it and then the followup was well do you have a difficult time convincing that he's not guilty and oh yeah I can't shck my mind so it it's just much more effective I find it's more likely be correlated with these other indicators of bias so it seems to be more more of a valid question um and when I did it you see um basically 51% indicated a strong opinion that we ship the burden of group onto the defendant and again if you look at our analysis of 100 jurors walking in that would be 50 out of 100 with would fall into that category it can't change their mind well I'm sure you can get them to say they can be fair if you as I see it all the time um but this doesn't mean they can't we heard a lot about that earlier today yeah all right and did you ask similar questions and free judgement for guills I guess prejudgment for the sentence yes so because this is a capital case I did ask whether or not which um sentence do they believe the jury should select if he's convicted and you can see 52% reported that he should get the death penalty based off of what they've read seen or heard whereas just 23.5 or 24% reported that we should um get life did you ask a fixed question about the penalty yes so I asked the same fixed opinion question and you find that 51% um believe that the sentence um should be de and that he couldn't convince them that should be life um only 19% reported that the defendant would not have a difficult time convincing them that he should get a life sence this is a small community what did you learn about the impact of this case on this small community and the pressure of a jur in lah County toest so one of the things I wanted to look at because it's a small community and people know everyone and the pressure when you're coming in and out of this courthouse on a day-to-day basis when there it's been inundated with journalists and my guess is people can figure out who on the jury by who's not picking their kids up at school and talking to neighbors and all that is there pressure the jurors ever feel pressure like there has to be a certain outow how how would the community react if if he's not convicted if he's s not guilty and there was quite a bit of strong comments on a range of themes from um people would basically kill him um to they burn the courthouse down or assume that the jury failed um or that he would have to prove that he was not guilty again Shifting the burden so it's like I can't imagine that happening because they have so much evid against evidence against him we would be dumbfounded like it's how could he not be guilty given the amount of evidence um s would be on the hunt for him to make sure he gets what's coming to him and then just emotional stuff that would be devastating to the community other people talked about the fear if he didn't do it well who did like that means just person still Among Us who creates the same stress of fear and anxiety that people had before so this community needs closure and you have to imagine what that's like for a jury from Once on end in and out of this courtroom in this tiny community and trying to explain their neighbors you know what they did and why and that shifts the burden again back on to the the comments that you've captured in this PowerPoint slide is this all no these are just a few examples PL any more for the court to read yeah did you ask these open questions in the comparative counties too yes it's the same question as counties were the other counties as high of rate in these kinds of answers do they have a similar kind of answer as Le County pil jurs did no now now you can read through it and you will find answers that people would be angry and upset because you're talking to hundreds of people you're going to get but you're they're much less strong they're much more you no opinion they wouldn't have an impact things like that than you see in other places very few people in L County have that all right I think um we have a couple of slides on the questions that were in the survey I think we know those yes so these are our case recognition questions we call them for um I call them recognition items I guess so um we do ask an openend question what have you read seen or heard about the case we'll get into that but that's the typical question you ask in jury selection and we and people answer that but they often use minimization language or un or unable to recall everything from so we asked later on these case recognition items to see if they're familiar with wiely reported media items and if you look at the professional guidelines this is what's recommended so you first ask an open-ended question and later you follow up with these close EIC questions what did you learn when you did that in in this survey with L so I'm not going to go through all of them but we learned that people are familiar with many items that have been widely reported in the media and you don't always see that sometimes case recognition is high but people don't know a lot of detail you know maybe they know a few items or recognition rates are 40 50% um but what we found here are people have welldeveloped attitudes and opinions and been recall a lot of prejudicial content so um in Le County you can see that 79% were familiar with at least five of the nine media items and 52% knew seven or more of media items that we tested over half and you tested on nine is that right yeah n and I think you mentioned but but I think your chart's going to explain to me why more media items more media recognition items correlate with the prejudgment question guilt yeah and this goes back to validity of the survey right we know from earlier research that case knowledge is correlated with prejudgment and that's exactly what we found so the more people know the more case knowledge the stronger their opinions the more likely they are to have developed a perception of guilt so people who were familiar with five or six items um you can see it's 66% guilt rate and for seven it's 82% so jumps up quite a bit so the more case knowledge you have the more likely you are to believe guilty and you see see the same thing with that um I call that fixed opinion question that's significantly related to case knowledge as well so the number of people who said that he would have a difficult time changing their mind is essentially 66% if they know seven or more items let's talk about the specific items that were known just a few of them we won't go through all of them what's what did you learn so these are just going through a few that we tested you can see high recognition rates and significantly related to prejudgment so whether or not people know that a knife sheet was found on the bed next to one of the victims 81% of survey respondents in Le County knew that detail and you can see it's significantly related to buas so if you knew that 72% of people who knew that item believe he's guilty and 55 5% reported that he would difficult time convincing them all us what about another media item what about what another media item thank you so the next one is whether or not they knew that DNA was found on the knife sheet that there was a match for the defendant and you can see that 67% know that detail and if you know it it's highly prejudicial so 75% of people who know that item believe that he's guilty and 60% reported a how about a vehicle record so this one whether or not Brian cober owns the same type of car recorded on the video driving in the neighborhood where the killings occur this was a wly reported media item um so 86% of people know that detail and 82% of those who do know that believe he's SK how about the cell phone tower media item so on that one you see a case recognition rate of or item recognition rate of 79% 79% of survey respondents do that detail and if you knew that 72% of them believe that um the defend guilty how about the media item stopy so this would go down to like a misinformation I I'll call it an inaccurate detail that was widely reported that the defendant had stoed one of the victim and you can see recognition rate currently 45% when the survey was done and 81% of people who knew that detail reported that SK how about following on social media I believe this is the last one you can see whether or not he was essentially following them on social media 45% recognition rate and 79% of those who know that will be is guilty and these are all statistically significant find let's talk about some of the comparative counties that you surveyed and if you can give me a high level of your key findings in those counties sure so now in my mind this shows significant bias um that there's a reasonable likelihood that the like due process has been undermined in the sense that there's a presumption of guilt in this County the question is if you were to move it is Earth FL where would you move it that's question too we're on the second part we're on to the second part and that's where this comes so you'll see recognition rates are high in these Three Counties we tested we we tested a county because it's the biggest county in the state it's about 46,000 people over the age of 18 and other high-profile cases have been moved there before really suff um Canon County we pick because I believe it's the second largest county and it is also um near adaa County so it's a big County we picked that and we picked banet County because it's just far away and so and it had less immediate coverage so we wanted to see if there was a possibility that people would have less case knowledge there and you can see recognition rates vary from 90% to uh I'm sorry from 84% to 93% across those three and um you could see that in terms of how closely they followed it is less than we saw in Lea County so Ada is 58 Canyon is 51 and banck is 46 compared to L County remember it was 68% much higher um the guilt rates are essentially the same or you know it's a little higher in danet County um but because of the population size there's a big difference so again you you'll find about 16 times more people in adaa County who have not prejudged compared to here um and then similar in terms of the strength of opinion and um difficulty in convincing them that he's not guilty similar to what you see here and sentence similar as well so you're in the 49 to 57% so numbers are also High where do you start to see differences that matter you start to see differences when you talk about personal connection that's where the big differences come up so remember we said 79% of people in um Ada County had talked about this case might wrong might have been higher um it's just 60% in Ada County 50% in Canyon and 51% Panic so it's much lower um you'll see whether or not um they've experienced high levels of stress in K county is just 177% and the other two counties is only 11% it was 39% in the county here and then whether or not they know someone who experienced higher levels of stress we had 45% here here we're down to 24 19 and 19 so you see big differences there in terms of the Community Connection the personal connection case what about um the connections to Moscow that are unique to this area yes so just 20% um in Ada County know someone who lived in Moscow 15% in Canyon and 16% in banck 78% in Le County whether or not they were a student or employee in Lea County that was 20 it was 25% and we're looking at 4% and 3% much lower whether they visited the home or saw it l count is 40% here without 8% 3% 2% much lower um whether or not they knew somebody who actually it was involved in the investigation in Lea County that number was 22% believe um and in Ada County it's just four Canyon is to Bates to so much lower when it comes to those type of connections the personal connection personal investment the case what about the recognition of media items yeah so we had I think it was 79% in L County knew at least five of those media items and it drops to 65% in Ada 52% in Canyon and 59% in banic um if they knew seven or more that was 52% in L County it's just 42% in adaa 27% in Canyon and 29% in Bic so less case knowledge and we know case knowledge comes back to belief perseverance right so the more you know the more resistant your attitudes are to change the more likely you are to attend to and process information consistent with what we know new information about the DNA evidence I already know about that that's credible I give that we so you're much more likely to see that L count fure all right um I think you told us a little bit about the population size and is that why you selected a was the population size so I'm not selecting anything I'm just pointing out some possibilities um so I selected Ada County in terms of to do the survey because it's the largest county in in the and you know it was a d case was moved there so you know that they can take this case in we know large counties it's it's less of a big deal when the case moves there it doesn't become the biggest story in that community so I wanted to test L side County B Canyon because it's the second largest county over you know 184,000 people and then I picked banic because it's um further away it's quite far away hundreds of miles from here just and it's in a different media Zone um it does have some of the similar of L count so for example there's a university there that's the second largest employer so there's a risk there about 18% of the population is connected to that University so there are those risks um and I think the problem there well some of the numbers are good are um it'll become a huge deal if that cases move there it's gonna you're G to have the media circuit move from here to there and it's going to become again a huge story in that community so there is risk if you choose a smaller venue that something like that will happer and that risk is tied specifically to the size of banic County yes smaller counties you don't have storage like this regularly happening so it's more likely become a big deal in that county and and you could end up with significant bias between the time of cases moved and the time that goes to trial because there might be an increase in media coverage there when we talk about the survey itself um was it only people who uh knew about the case that took the survey no no that explain to me what you mean by that well I'm looking at your slide here about people um who whether or not they know about the case do they finish the survey I think one of the things the state's criticized about is a non-response bias so I want to understand if you can tell if that about how how survey works this one and others right so first of all one thing we do is we do comparison surveys in a host of different cases so if you look at other cases we've done this on if that were true um you would find that only people who take this who know about the case take the survey In the comparison cap as well right so you can see in rro this was an Idaho case in C County 89% of survey respondents recognize the case that took the survey that completed it in the a county 67% of the people that completed the survey did not know about the case so you would expect to you wouldn't see that Trend if people just say I don't know about this I'm not going to take the survey I have no opinion um in state of Tennessee the Andrew dely similar findings so in Davidson County 67% of the people who completed the survey knew about the case in Hamilton County 84% of people who completed the survey did not know anything about the case um in United States Fe James Cloud which was in Washington um you can look at we did three venues and in yaka the 55% of the people that completed the survey knew about the case in Richland 82% did not know about the case in Spokane 90% did not know about the case what's unique and why you see high recognition Race Across these the surveys here because it's a national case and when we have National cases you see high recognition race all over so this this last one the state of Minnesota the Alexander King was the George FL case and you can see High recognition rates in all the counties just like we see here the reason is because there's a lot of media exposure everywhere but it's not that people are hanging up because they don't want to take the survey in fact if you look at the call data um after they were told the case recognition question and described the case only one person hung up out of the 12200 people that completed the survey and one person who terminated the survey after being told what the case the survey was about all four counties four counties one first that's all right we have talked quite a bit about the bias and the prejudicial media coverage and the difficulty the impossibility that will happen seing a jury in lto County I want to talk a little bit about jury selection in cases that have a lot of publicity are you familiar with that sure yes all right why why should we talk about this now why do we not want to just wait and try to pick a jury first well so I think between I mean first of all I've done a lot of jury selections I'm sure you have your H you have I'm sure you all have so we all know how the jury selection process works so in a normal case people do not have case specific attitudes and we know specific attitudes are predictive of behavior so I might just have a general passing attitude towards something I mentioned Dy or it's like a contract dispute like you can ask me question I don't have strong opinions I don't know anything about the case um so they're not specific attitudes so jury selection is effective in that scenario is fine but when people have a specific attitudes and a specific knowledge and I've heard information and evidence even if it's coming into trial I've heard it in the context of a news story there's no rules of evidence that were applied there was no cross-examination um there was no counter expert to refute what was said it was just said by a public you know speaker it was on a editorial on a television station Nancy Grace so it's very different and then when I hear it as evidence it's just confirming what I already know it's not new not processing it for the first time so that's one of the big problems so why you need to identify people that have that content and information and there's challenges because of the way memory Works um recall is limited and we'll get to that but you when you ask people what do you know about the case they are not able to give a full account of everything they know so it's very hard to assess what people know which makes it very difficult to exercise cause challenges and prary challenges um and the other thing is just the nature of CH or of jury selection it's very easy to rehabilitate a juror to get them to say they can be fair it happens all the time so a juror says that I have this experience where I think I'm leaning towards one side and it's so easy we do it all the time to get a socially desirable response we start with well the law requires everyone to be fair everybody has their own opinions and that's okay um we're just asking you can you follow the law can you follow the instructions can you deliver it can you be fair and most people will say yes to that because they want to create a socially desirable response they know what the right answer is keep leading questions um in one study they actually analyze the transcript or three Tri transcripts and it was like 60% of the the comments during Vader were from attorneys and judges just 40% were from jurors and 63% of the comments from jurors were one-word answers and I see that in the postconviction stuff I do when I analyze transcripts it's three pages of indoctrination into what a juror is supposed to do ending with the closed ended answer can you set it aside that's not an indicator of what the ability to do that people can't just Men In Black flashy think themselves and forget everything doesn't work that way I think we may have covered B dire and honest disclosure with that and I didn't Advance the slide can you give us a case example or an example of this sure so this is an example of of stealth J so a case like this you're stealth J stealth there's a likelihood that people want to be on this case right it's a high-profile case it's going to be on TV get a lot of attention there might be a desire to see Justice and you want to be involved in that well how do you identify churs like that um so this is an example case I worked on where it was a long time ago was in LA there was this division in the police department came called the Rampart Division Rampart and basically there were a number of corrupt police officers who were stealing drugs out of the evidence Locker shooting suspects and planting guns on them it was these Rogue police officers and one of the the people um his his last name was aond he had been shot by a police officer Sky Perez who then planted a gun on him and alleged that aando had shot at him so he was convicted of attempted murder he was paralyzed from the waist down and then Perez got caught stealing drugs out of a locker room so he confessed to all these things and aond was released he got like a $20 million settlement against LA County then he sued the public defender claiming that you know they should have figured this whole thing out and and known that you know there was this Scandal and so on and it won like $6 million in that case and then later when they looked it turned out that one of the jurors on that case had been in a movie about the incident called Game wars and when they asked would has anybody have a connection to the case she didn't raise ra her hand um but during the deliberation she talked about stuff she knew she talked about stuff that didn't come into trial and resulted in a Mist trial so that's just one example of there's other examples as well but yeah so that's one challenge you have in the case like that all right um recall and recognition I think you're going to talk to us about how hard it is to Fig out what somebody knows so to me this is one of the big challenges in high-profile cases so the question you ask on a jur questionnaire and an open V is what have you read seen or heard about this case that's the open-ended question you ask that is what we call a recall question and the cognitive task is on the spot I need to search my memory and see what's accessible and Salient and what I can remember on the spot and I'll tell you and that's and and then you it's usually followed up with can you be fair and impartial and what we find is people are not able to recall everything they know and that information that they forgot to mention comes up later so the common example is tell me everything you know about a movie I'm going to go with Star Wars and you probably will tell me a lot because a lot of people have seen that movie we seen it a bunch of times but if I asked you followup closed Ed questions You' find that you forgot to mention a whole bunch of things like I would maybe you didn't mention that Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's or son right and it was do remember that oh of course I know that I just forgot to mention it so you see things like that um so the triky thing is you can't ask people have you read seen or heard if the defendant was stalking one of the victims because now you're poisoning the well what if they didn't mention that in their open-ended doesn't mean they don't know it because we know about 45% of the population here does know it so you're in that position where you are trying to make an assessment if this jur can truly be fair and impartial without knowing what this jur actually knows about the case and that's one of the biggest problems you have in high-profile cases that are not a problem in your run Mill tyal case have you seen that um bear itself out in a real case I have um this was a case in Texas um where we actually had community members come in during the venue hearing and treated them like mock jurors in a sense and asked them what they knew about the case and they told us it was a big case in at the time Ingo County in Texas and people told us what they knew and then we asked said everything you know and they'd say yes that's it and because it's not real jury selection we had the opportunity to demonstrate this whole problem and we would say things like well did you know that he allegedly confessed and then it would stimulate a memory and the person would say oh yeah I did know that he actually confessed twice at a monastery so it triggered a memory and then it was well is that everything else you know know do you know anything else and they say no that's it and say well did you ever hear that he had committed another crime they say oh yeah that's right he actually attacked another girl at a different Church in a nearby town and it was well is that everything you know take your time search your memory that's it and then we do it again and it was well did you know there was a cover up oh yeah the Catholic Church covered it up and the police department and it just demonstrated the problem now that was fine in that little demonstration did but you could never do that in jury selection because if you did that you just poison that juror you if they don't know it you just poison them if they did know it then you have to get rid of that right so you're in this impossible position um in terms of trying to figure out if you if this jur can be truly fair and partial when you don't know what they know do we have um a glimpse of how that works in Brian cober's case based on the Sur we do all right how do we know tell me about that so we always use the open-ended question what have you seen or heard about the case and code it and what we found is on average people reported 1.6 details when asked that open-ended question so we know that's the average number of details they report and then we compare that to the closed ended questions later those nine media items to see if there's additional items that they actually recognize that they failed to mention in the open and what we found in this case was that 96% of survey respondents knew at least one of these media items that they failed to mention in the open and on average they recognized an additional 4.9 media items so almost five out of the fail to that and these are just some examples so you know someone said what have you read seen heard about this case just what has been on the TV and the papers so that's minimization like they use the word just there's no specific detail um but later when we asked those Clos ended questions that person knew all nine of them um another one is just what I've read and seen on the news and newspapers again new all nine read articles about the case knew eight of the nine just what I read in the paper same as everyone else seven of the nine so these are just a few examples but this is what happens this is what you see on J questionnaires this is what you see in Vader um and and I mentioned that yeah anyways yeah and that's dangerous in this case because of the amount of prejudicial media coverage is that right it's dangerous in this case and in high-profile cases that's the unique problem they create what's unusual in this one is one it's in a small community and two people here have very welldeveloped um schema and attitudes in case um I think you have have some specific examples of some of the media items tested about how many recognized an item that had noted yeah so just to give it two two examples to make the point so this is the one we talked about whether or not defendant stopped one of the victims prejudicial 45% of survey respondents recognize this item when we ask have you R seen or her in but when we ask the open-ended question what have you read seen or heard about this case only 3% mentioned it on their so 3% of people reported this item and but 45% actually recognize it later on and we know it's not only is it not true but it's also prejudicial because 81% of people that know it have already judged the defendant as guilty so it's really important to know who are the people in this panel that know that detail um so your choice is to just assume no one knows it because they didn't spontaneously mention it or Poison the Well by asking the juror specifically did you know that Brian cob allegely sto at so that's a typical position that let's look at one more example of how that worked so this is the one about the knife sheet whether or not police found a knife sheet on the B so you probably want to know that well 81% of people recognize that item later U but only 8% mentioned it when asked the opene question so again just demonstrating the problem these are items that are correlated with bias we know that there's a high rate of recognition in the community but when you ask in jury selection what have you read seen or heard about the case very few people mention it this is what you see all right the magic question can you set it aside and be fair and impartial is that going to work I'm what's the question is this going to work this question um yeah so you wonder what is this a good question bad question well work will it help us will it work um what does work mean I don't know if you about that help us find an impartial jury no there's no data to suggest that this is a valid question and just touching on the research again um what you would expect is people that know a lot about the case or been exposed to prejudicial preow publicity would be more likely to say they cannot be fair and impartial compared to people that do not know a lot about the case and it's not there's no significant relationship people who know a lot of detail and have been exposed to prejudicial pre-op publicity are just as likely to say they can be fair and impartial as people who have not and yeah so it is there's no data to support that and do you have an example to tell us about so this is some research I did on this question to see um how people respond to it and so what I did was I went um to a Facebook page that was about this documentary on HBO that got a lot of attention called the Jinx the Jinx was about a person named Robert burst who had been a suspect for multiple murders for his wife um he was went to trial in Texas for murder and then a good friend of his in California was killed and he was suspected to be involved in that as well um he what was unique he was from a very wealthy family New York so captured a lot of people's attention and there was this miniseries on HBO and at the end of it they confront him with some evidence that was suggests he was involved with his friend Susan's murder and he takes a break and he goes into the bathroom and he forgot that he was wearing a microphone and he pretty much confesses he says of course I shot them all or of course I killed them all he's talking to himself so it was a highly prejudicial um documentary and later on he was charged with the murder of his friend so what we did was we went to this Facebook page where people had made public statements about um the defendant that were highly prejudicial so this is just one example someone said this is the true version or vision of a sociopath I'm physically ill over the conclusion I'm beside myself I was overjoyed at the news that he was arrested so if somebody said this in public about this case I think we'd all agree that person probably can't be fair you're publicly stating it to the world there you think he's a sociopath so we recruited people that made these extreme comments on this page and went through a survey and we asked if they knew about the case whether they thought it was guilty but they knew and so on you can see as you'd expect almost everybody we recruited who made these public statements reported that um Robert dur was guilty of mar 92% and reported strong opinion 77% of the people we recruited said that he could not change their life about his guil so almost every um and then we ask those closed ended case recognition questions and many of these are either inadmissible or very prejudicial you know that he was like a suspect in his wife's disappearance that probably not admissible in a different case his murder trial in Texas we have several of these and the confession the captured confession see 100% knew that which is considered like the most prejudicial thing that can be the media according to the Supreme Court um and so what we fact is that these people would say I cannot be fair and impartial there's so much bias that they're demonstrating so we give them the magic instruction that you often see this came from a transcript in a high-profile case where the court had explained the burden of proof and that the defendant's entitled to a fair and impartial trial um and that you the law requires that you set aside everything you know and only rely on the evidence common things you hear and all these people who Express all this public bias and all this vitriol and reported that he's guilty and you can't change your mind by just saying that to them magically report that they can be fair and impartial 81% said they could be fair and impartial after hearing that instruction and they gave open-ended responses as to why and so this is our participant who mentioned that they were Overjoyed by his arrest and they were physically ill that Robert was a sociopath will they un escal yes definitely to no definitely not they reported that they could definitely be fair and impartial and they reported that I could start from the beginning and listen to all the information presented and follow the directions and wipe out everything I know I would need to be convinced the under a shadow of it doubt so that answer if you see in a courtroom without knowing that this person was making public statements about the defendant being a sociopath probably considered rehabilitated as a fair and impartial demonstrates like a person like that should be answering that question no but they don't um and even kind of going back to the the Rau case which was a you know recorded confession um in the police station with the chief of police on one side and officers on the next played in the media with music on it it was highly prejudicial in a small town and the Supreme Court ruled that you know threw up the conviction because of it all the jurors in that case who saw that confession reported that they could be fair and impartial they all sat on that trial they all reported that they could be fair and the Supreme Court didn't take that at face value because the content of the coverage was so PR all right based on your years of experience your education all of the work that you do in general and then specifically the work that you've done in this case the survey the hundreds of comments do you have an opin opinion about this case and whether we can seek an impartial jury in leog County I did what is your opinion so my opinion again is based on whether or not there's a reasonable likely good so using that standard Which is less less than the propon of the evidence Lea county is a small venue and the crime has been seared in the community's Consciousness people have been saturated with prejudicial coverage many people here have direct and indirect connections to this crime um people here demonstrate there would be experienced fear and stress panic in this community um there's significant rumors and misin information that have been spread and people have been exposed to in this community um there's a feeling pressure to convict I think given the reaction that people think a community would have if he's acquitted as particularly concerning um we know from the data that jurors have closely followed the case they' talked about it they're familiar with prejudicial details I think that the presumption of innocence has been undermined and a presumption of guilt prevails in this community um and I think the pre-existing attitudes and opinions will influence how people process evidence so even if the same information is presented at trial there's a big difference in terms of jurors being exposed to that for the first time I don't know about the DNA evidence I don't know about the videos versus a jurer being exposed to something that they already know where they're just confirming what they already know I already know about the DNA evidence it's just triggering a memory of what I already recall and I'm processing this information through that filter but it's consistent with what I believe and I already know and it impacts how they see government Witnesses and how they will View and evaluate defense Witnesses and I don't think vad year is effective remedy given the research I've done my experience doing jury selections and the nature of how memory works so taking all that combine I think it's appropriate to to change that thank you I don't have any other questions your honor and H if you stay okay thank you M Taylor so this would be a good time to take a break sure uh and we'll come back at 3:20 thank you this has been a special report from True Crime today and the hidden Killers podcast