CBS News98%
Legal analyst on whether Bryan Kohberger can take back guilty plea in University of Idaho murders 94%
7/27/2026, 5:56:18 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Halo Effect, with Burden of Proof as the most egregious example at 50.1% saturation with 223 hits. Analysis detected 1,653 faulty-reasoning hits from 445 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 87.2% and a BS Rank of 94% (1,556 of 25,563 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 93.90% of the video peer group.
The band serving multiple life sentences for the murders of four University of Idaho students in 2022 is now challenging his conviction.
Brian Clberger filed a petition today claiming he was misled into confessing.
He pleaded guilty last July to avoid the death penalty.
Prosecutors previously said if the case had gone to trial, they would have introduced DNA evidence linking Cobberger to a knife sheath found at the home where the students were killed.
Weapon has never been recovered.
For more, let's bring in CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levenson.
She's also a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
So Jessica, has this ever been done before?
Can you even withdraw a guilty plea?
Well, you can certainly try, but it's somewhat akin to trying to undo a contract.
And in this case, Coberger did in fact essentially sign a contract.
He signed a guilty plea.
He not only signed that, but a judge asked him, "Do you understand that you are pleading guilty?" There was an exchange where the judge said, "Are you pleading guilty because you in fact are guilty?" He said, "Yes."
And then there's a lengthy essentially again contract, but plea agreement that he and others sign and it says, "I'm doing this knowingly. I'm doing this voluntarily. I have been advised of my rights. I understand what I'm waving."
And so, can you try to make these claims?
Yes, but it is exceedingly rare that they are successful, particularly again when you have all of this evidence that in fact somebody has knowingly and voluntarily waved their rights and decided to plead guilty.
>> So is the bar like new evidence?
And if he's successful, how could that play out?
So the bar in this case, I don't think it would be based on new evidence
because his claim is based on ineffective assistance of counsel essentially that he was promised things that didn't pan out.
Again, I think that would be very difficult for him to pass
the threshold that even if there was a misunderstanding between him and his attorney that he didn't knowingly and voluntarily enter into that plea deal,
which is what you need.
If we did get to that kind of extremely extremely rare circumstance, you then could go to trial.
And then of course we have to remember that there's an enormous amount of evidence that would be introduced at trial against Kobberger.
So I think that's what would happen again in that rare circumstance in which you unwind a guilty plea.
Jessica Levenson, thank
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