Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1372 ｜ Is Tyler Robinson Protecting Lance Twiggs？ Criminal Defense Attorney Explains ｜ Robert Gouveia

00:00:00.260 The American justice system has one biblical characteristic, and that is that the accused

00:00:05.440 has rights.

00:00:06.820 They are innocent until proven guilty.

00:00:09.080 On Monday, we went through the prosecution's case and evidence against Tyler Robinson,

00:00:14.260 the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk.

00:00:17.000 But today we've got a criminal defense attorney.

00:00:19.640 His name is Robert Govea, and he is here to talk about the defense's case and what evidence

00:00:26.220 they will present, the theories and the counter arguments that will be brought forth by their

00:00:31.300 side in trial, and then how the prosecution's evidence stacks up against that.

00:00:36.340 This is a super insightful conversation from an attorney's perspective.

00:00:40.640 I learned a lot.

00:00:41.680 You will too.

00:00:42.620 We've got all of this and so much more on today's episode of Relatable.

00:00:45.840 Robert, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Could you tell everyone who may not know who

00:01:00.220 you are and what you do? Yeah, thank you, Allie, for having us here today. My name is Robert. I'm

00:01:05.080 a criminal defense lawyer, practiced law for about 10 years. Now we host a live stream on YouTube

00:01:10.780 called Watching the Watchers. We go live every day of the week and we talk a lot about legal

00:01:15.680 issues, legal cases like Tyler Robinson and many others that are out there, Supreme Court

00:01:20.580 news, Judiciary Committee news, things that are going on in the Senate.

00:01:24.280 We like to watch the watchers, keep an eye on our government.

00:01:27.260 And we do it with our background as a lawyer and as people who've been in the game and

00:01:32.760 seeing how this stuff happens firsthand.

00:01:35.680 With your background, what was your biggest takeaway from the preliminary hearing of Tyler

00:01:39.900 Robinson?

00:01:40.280 The entire preliminary hearing was something, I think, new for many people to see on the scale

00:01:48.000 in which we saw it. This is not something that is common in criminal law or in American

00:01:54.360 jurisprudence at the scale that we saw it recently. Normally, when people are indicted

00:02:00.120 on murder charges, we see them go through the indictment process. And if you take a look at

00:02:05.000 some other comparable cases like the Luigi Mangione case. This was the defendant who allegedly

00:02:10.260 shot the CEO assassin in the back in New York. He was indicted. There was a grand jury that was

00:02:15.800 convened. And what that means is this all happened behind closed doors. So the prosecutors present

00:02:21.580 evidence to grand jurors and the public is not a part of the process at all. It's all in secret

00:02:28.260 and it's all by design, something that is not accessible. And what happened there, of course,

00:02:33.460 is he gets indicted. And so we get, after that process, a list of charges. He's now

00:02:39.080 continued to be prosecuted. And we advance all the way up through the pretrial proceedings into

00:02:44.460 trial. We saw something a little similar in the Derek Chauvin, George Floyd case, where Derek

00:02:50.880 Chauvin, of course, was convicted ultimately of murdering, killing George Floyd with the knee on

00:02:57.160 the neck that we all saw on video and on camera for basically years. But in that case, we waived

00:03:04.520 the indictment. We waived the probable cause determination. And so he just kind of advanced

00:03:09.900 through this mechanism that we're looking at right now and was then ultimately something that we saw

00:03:16.420 progress through and to trial where we saw a lot of the evidence come out. And so this case is

00:03:21.540 different. In fact, in Utah, when I was looking up some prior cases, the other preliminary hearings

00:03:27.500 that came out of Utah were only one to two days. They were pretty brief. And the reason for that

00:03:34.020 is because it's just a preliminary hearing. The only thing we're trying to establish right now

00:03:38.560 is whether there is probable cause to bind this defendant over for the trial process.

00:03:45.240 And this is a protection that we have in American law to make sure that if somebody's going to be

00:03:50.020 put through the trial process. It's very grueling. We have a presumption of innocence. And that means

00:03:54.880 we want to make sure that if we're going to put them through this multi-year long process,

00:03:58.300 especially in this case where it's a capital death penalty case, that there is a sufficient

00:04:03.160 basis for the charges. And so we're just trying to establish essentially the standard is whether

00:04:08.760 there is a reasonable belief that a crime was committed. We all saw Charlie Kirk get shot and

00:04:14.420 killed. So there was a crime. And then the next component is whether there's a reasonable belief

00:04:18.900 that the person who is sitting in the courtroom is the person responsible for that crime. So it's

00:04:25.580 not even remotely close to the same standard that you see at a trial. And so in many preliminary

00:04:32.300 hearing cases, and Utah is a little unusual relative to other states because this is their

00:04:37.720 default process. They don't go through the grand jury proceedings like other states do. They do

00:04:42.500 this by default. And it was very extensive. It was very intense. We got to see a lot of evidence

00:04:48.880 at this early stage in a way that we don't ordinarily see.

00:04:53.040 Normally, I mean, you could make the argument that even in this case,

00:04:55.700 it was a little bit maybe gratuitous.

00:04:58.420 I think there's reasons for that, but it was long.

00:05:01.980 It was extensive.

00:05:02.800 We got to hear from DNA analysts.

00:05:04.800 We got to hear from some ballistics reports.

00:05:07.940 We heard from multiple officers.

00:05:09.860 We had some cross-examination from the defense.

00:05:12.780 And really, many people are commenting that this could have been something

00:05:15.200 that was handled in a day, even a couple of hours, you could just have a couple of the bits

00:05:21.100 of evidence come in to say that we've set and met the standard, that there is probable cause,

00:05:26.240 we'll bind this thing over and then advance towards a trial. But what we got instead was

00:05:31.440 a bunch of evidence, a bunch of video, a very intense five days. And of course, a lot of people

00:05:36.660 debating what came out of this, what the evidence showed or what it didn't show. And now I think

00:05:44.300 You know, the question remains what comes next only in this process, because we still have a lot of time until this judge is going to make a decision on this.

00:05:51.740 We've got briefings scheduled and then we're not back until September.

00:05:54.740 And then really the case starts in full.

00:05:57.740 Then we're going to be working our way towards the full trial, which could still be another year or two, maybe longer out.

00:06:04.020 Right. So the strange thing, I think, just to the public, people who aren't as familiar with these legal proceedings, is this preliminary hearing, like you said, maybe not entirely unprecedented.

00:06:14.300 This is apparently how Utah does things.

00:06:17.580 But in my memory, I don't remember this drawn out televised preliminary hearing in the past

00:06:23.940 for these contentious cases.

00:06:25.880 And it is strange.

00:06:27.580 I've seen a lot of people, I think, mistakenly say the trial.

00:06:31.520 This is the trial.

00:06:32.520 We're watching the trial because it felt like a trial.

00:06:35.680 Yes, the jury was absent.

00:06:37.040 There wasn't a jury there, you know, deliberating, but it felt like the real thing.

00:06:41.840 And so tell us why.

00:06:43.800 Why was this so drawn out? Why did this take five days? Why did it feel like this was really

00:06:51.160 the defense and prosecution going at it as if it was the real deal?

00:06:57.140 I think there was an interesting line that came out in this preliminary hearing. Somebody said

00:07:04.580 back to the judge, they were quoting him. They said, judge, you had said that sometimes you have

00:07:09.940 to spend time to save time. You have to go through a bunch of these motions in order maybe

00:07:17.120 to prevent yourself from having to do a bunch of additional things down the line. And to me,

00:07:22.420 that hinted at maybe if we lay all this out at this early stage, that that might shake loose

00:07:28.380 the parties into some sort of a resolution, into some sort of a plea deal. So in other words,

00:07:33.420 rather than having a very short, tight preliminary hearing where we get very little evidence that is

00:07:39.200 released, we can have a much more drawn out process so that people can see what both sides

00:07:44.980 have and what both sides' arguments are in the hopes that maybe this will not result in a full

00:07:49.900 blown two, three year litigation process and it may shake loose a plea deal. Now, that may not

00:07:57.180 ultimately happen. We haven't seen a lot of the evidence. In fact, I think we're just really

00:08:01.960 scratching the surface. Even though it was five days, I think a trial could easily be six weeks,

00:08:08.020 five, six weeks, maybe even longer. And so the prosecution was just kind of scratching the

00:08:13.240 surface on a lot of the material that was presented. And there's a lot of depth. There

00:08:18.800 was kind of a broad presentation, but each one of the various components that they discussed

00:08:23.120 can go very deep. And the defense will also respond to that with their own theory and their

00:08:28.880 own case in chief. And we might get, if they want to contest the bullet as being what actually

00:08:34.240 killed Charlie, then they'll have their own expert witnesses who will come in and respond to these

00:08:39.500 things and present their own case in chief with their own theories and their own witnesses.

00:08:43.680 And so we really didn't get into a lot of that at this moment. And we can, of course, dive into

00:08:47.960 each one of these components. But I also think that there may have been a little bit of a desire

00:08:52.520 from the judge to allow the public in a little bit more on this case. We've seen that when there is

00:09:00.060 no detail about exactly what went down, people will fill in the gaps, right? Nature abhors a

00:09:07.100 vacuum, as they say. And so when we don't know exactly what happened, people will kind of make

00:09:12.340 it up, fill in the gaps and speculate. And this is part of the process. I think the defense is

00:09:17.140 going to come up with theories. People in the public will come up with their own theories about

00:09:20.500 how this all went down. And that actually can, in some ways, help the system. It can help the

00:09:26.040 prosecution, identify what those theories are and what those theses might be about an alternative

00:09:31.660 explanation. And then we have this process where iron sharpens iron, right? It's the adversarial

00:09:36.420 system. The beauty of our process is that both sides come in, they make their best arguments,

00:09:40.540 and then we can whittle down into the truth. But in Utah, things are a little slow. And as we saw,

00:09:48.360 Charlie was killed in September of last year, and we're just now getting to the preliminary

00:09:52.800 hearing. We're just now sort of seeing some of the evidence that exists. And so if this was

00:09:57.860 not as a long process, if this was very tightly wound and we just had maybe a day or six hours

00:10:05.700 of testimony, then it would still enable that void to exist and people will continue to fill

00:10:12.560 that void. And I'm wondering if the judge, who is a former prosecutor, is thinking that that might

00:10:17.420 actually jeopardize the case. It might actually create this environment in the media and in the

00:10:23.120 public that undermines Tyler Robinson's due process or that enables the jury to be tainted

00:10:30.140 to such a degree that he can come back later after the trial and claim that something perverted his

00:10:35.960 rights and would require this whole thing to be done over again.

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00:11:59.580 Do you think it's possible that the judge does not find probable cause?

00:12:03.980 I mean, to me, it seems like there is at least probable cause.

00:12:08.740 It seems like a lot more was presented from my perspective.

00:12:12.520 Do you think that there's any chance that he doesn't find that?

00:12:18.080 Very, very, very low chance that this does not get bound over.

00:12:22.660 I think he will find probable cause.

00:12:24.600 I think in most indictments, most probable cause determination hearings, unless there's

00:12:30.140 something very abnormal or something very problematic, like massive tainting of evidence

00:12:35.820 or some major ethical conflict or something, it gets bound over. And the reason for that is

00:12:40.860 because it's just such a low standard. We're not at beyond a reasonable doubt. We're not even at

00:12:45.520 clear and convincing evidence, which are these kind of gradations of criminality or liability

00:12:51.400 in our law. It's such a low standard. It's just, is there a reasonable belief that there was a

00:12:56.500 crime committed? That's obvious. Charlie's dead. And is there a reasonable belief that this person,

00:13:01.380 Tyler Robinson, did it? And if you start to go through the evidence, I agree with you. I think

00:13:04.960 that there was a lot presented. And even past this point, the defense is going to have to

00:13:09.960 really come up with some alternative theories on how to explain a lot of the evidence that

00:13:14.160 was presented, whether it's the DNA evidence, the ballistics, the confessions. Tyler Robinson made

00:13:19.780 multiple admissions slash confessions in the process. We had Lance Twiggs, his boyfriend,

00:13:25.220 testify that he saw a bunch of these things happen in real time. So they'll have their

00:13:30.080 work cut out for them. But I do think that the judge is being very careful about this.

00:13:34.980 And so we'll hear briefings on this. He's actually ordered both sides to process the

00:13:40.120 last five days and write their main arguments into two competing briefs. And then we come

00:13:44.840 back in September for oral argument on it. And that's all pretty usual in Utah. And I

00:13:49.780 know a lot of people were upset about that. Even I was thinking, we're waiting till September

00:13:53.800 on this thing that's just going to enable more people to fill in the gaps and to contemplate

00:13:59.040 over what's happening. But then both sides will present their evidence. The judge will make the

00:14:03.420 decision. And I'm, you know, 99.99% certain he's going to bind it over because there wasn't anything

00:14:10.700 that the defense presented and they didn't present a lot. They were just kind of responding to the

00:14:15.880 prosecution's main case in chief that would wreck or shatter the prosecution. And so if the judge

00:14:21.340 is weighing the same evidence that we saw appropriately. I think he's really going to

00:14:24.900 have no decision other than to bind it over. In this case, we'll get back on path for trial.

00:14:30.100 Yeah. You know, one thing I saw people speculate or people say online is that the reason why this

00:14:36.880 preliminary hearing took as long as it did is because the defense was pushing back so hard

00:14:42.280 against the publication or against the release of some of the evidence that the prosecution was

00:14:48.700 bringing forth so my question for you especially with your particular background is twofold

00:14:53.500 one do you think that's true do you think that the defense's strategy there did lengthen this

00:14:59.140 preliminary hearing and two what you think about the defense's strategy overall last week

00:15:05.000 the defense is doing a very solid job from my perspective and they've been fighting tooth and

00:15:12.080 nail throughout this entire case not only at the preliminary hearing but even before we got here

00:15:17.940 They were filing motions right at the outset to keep the media out, to keep audio recordings out, to really lock this trial down, probably in part because they know that a lot of the evidence is going to be just damning facially, that if you can see the text messages, if you can see or hear from Lance Twiggs, the boyfriend, and hear his admissions, people are going to start to fill in those gaps with the belief that Tyler Robinson ultimately did this.

00:15:44.220 So they did not want any of that to become public and be a part of the public record, wanted to litigate a lot of this behind closed doors. And that went on for months. I mean, they fought. They're even appealing a lot of this stuff to the Utah Supreme Court to say that it's a violation of Tyler Robinson's due process rights, that if you enable the public to see all these things or if you enable hearsay at a preliminary hearing, which is essentially in the rules, that you're going to be jeopardizing his rights.

00:16:10.920 And so they've been starting at the outset in a very, very adversarial position. And then that's not to mention the other strategies that they've deployed. They said that one of the prosecutors had a child who was actually there at the event when Charlie Kirk was killed, and that that warranted a disqualification of the entire prosecutor's office. And we litigated that for a long time.

00:16:34.400 So people will also ask, why did the preliminary hearing just happen now? We're now in July. Charlie was killed back in September. Why did it take so long? And it's because the defense has been doing this from the very beginning. So they tried to disqualify the entire prosecutor's office by saying that the entire case was biased and prejudiced because one of the main prosecutors had a child at the event.

00:16:55.040 And so therefore, he's not looking at this at a neutral or, you know, unbiased perspective.

00:17:01.200 He's actually waging war against Tyler Robinson in order to vindicate his child and what the

00:17:07.580 child witnessed and went through.

00:17:08.880 So in other words, he's kind of a victim.

00:17:10.260 So that was litigated for a long time.

00:17:12.400 And of course, the judge Graff rejected that claim.

00:17:15.240 It's the same prosecutor.

00:17:16.320 They're still on the case.

00:17:17.640 But then there was another back and forth that the defense jumped all over.

00:17:22.260 We saw that there was that report in the Daily Mail, I think is where it started.

00:17:26.460 And then it spread across the Internet like wildfire, where they shared the headline that the bullet of Tyler Robinson's gun did not match the rifle.

00:17:35.640 And that was because they got a ballistics report, you know, some a forensic exam that came back from, I believe, the ATF.

00:17:43.240 And it didn't exactly say that. It said that the match was inconclusive.

00:17:47.380 So they couldn't connect it back to the rifle. They couldn't disqualify it from the rifle.

00:17:51.700 when a bullet enters a person or hits a target it is in mushrooms many people have seen these

00:17:57.680 photos may have even seen the photograph in the tyler robinson case but it becomes very difficult

00:18:03.840 to match when the bullet gets so perverted and contorted kind of blossoms like into a flower

00:18:08.620 and then you can't match the etchings on the outer jacket of the bullet as it goes through

00:18:14.480 the rifle barrel and so this report hit the media and everybody was sharing it like wildfire it's

00:18:19.900 the gun doesn't match the bullet. So therefore, Tyler Robinson is excluded as the suspect who

00:18:25.680 shot Charlie. Of course, that's not what it said. It just said it was inconclusive. We couldn't

00:18:30.200 exclude it. We couldn't include it. And so the prosecution then, they went out and they started

00:18:35.240 to correct the record. They were also going to the media, I think TMZ and other people and

00:18:40.120 explaining that's not what the report said. This is what it actually said. And so then the defense

00:18:44.660 latched onto that as well. They said, oh, now you are violating a court order. Now, prosecution,

00:18:51.040 you have breached something that the court ordered you to do. And that's a procedural problem

00:18:56.680 and an error. And so they made the argument that there should be sanctions for that. And they

00:19:00.660 ultimately were sanctioned. But the defense is trying to engineer these procedural exploits,

00:19:07.440 essentially, to say that if the prosecution does something bad, or if there's a bad evidentiary

00:19:11.760 ruling or if evidence is admitted that should be excluded, that they can then use that as

00:19:16.700 an argument to help their client, which is standard operating procedure in criminal defense

00:19:21.180 law and very aggressive and good tactic if you're representing your client well.

00:19:26.400 And they, in this case, when that all happened, they wanted the prosecution to be sanctioned

00:19:30.380 and they wanted really the death penalty to be taken off of the table.

00:19:34.160 So you can see it by waiting for a mistake to happen and by exploiting that, you can

00:19:39.200 then come back and make some major claims that are going to benefit your client. And we saw a lot of

00:19:43.920 that happen in the preliminary hearing. We saw that there was a note that leaked out. The handwritten

00:19:49.820 Tyler Robinson note was actually something that shouldn't have been published. It was published.

00:19:55.480 And then after that happened, the defense came out and they said, we want all the cameras turned

00:19:59.500 off now. We want all the audio to be turned off now and revert back to that original demand that

00:20:04.600 they had at the very outset of the case, which is to lock everything down. So by, you know,

00:20:09.500 kind of being obnoxious and by being very aggressive, they're trying to engineer a

00:20:13.060 tactical win for their client. And that's just good lawyering. Yeah. So they're basically

00:20:18.960 centering their side on we're protecting his due process rights and trying to ensure that this is

00:20:25.120 a fair, impartial process for him, which of course, all of us who believe I'm talking about,

00:20:32.060 myself and a lot of people out there who believe that Tyler Robinson is the guy. Of course, we

00:20:37.340 want him to see justice. And it's hard, I think, for some people to think, well, how could you

00:20:42.980 defend someone like this? But we want there to be attorneys who will defend the due process

00:20:47.920 rights of the accused. That's good news for all of us. As you've said multiple times, that is part

00:20:52.800 of our system. But so far, the defense has focused on that, right? They haven't, at least so far,

00:20:59.100 said, hey, like, we don't think that Tyler Robinson is the guy. We don't think our client

00:21:04.920 committed this. I don't even know if that would be appropriate at this point, but it seems like

00:21:08.720 it's more procedural in their argumentation rather than trying to prove his innocence, correct?

00:21:17.420 Yeah, that's right. We haven't seen their full thesis or theory of the case come out yet. And

00:21:22.800 there's a couple of different ways that you can approach, of course, a criminal defense case.

00:21:26.880 One is to make the argument that he's factually innocent, that he is not the shooter. He was not on the roof. He was not there that day. He has an alibi. He was at work or he was at somebody else's house. You know, the DNA matches are all just a coincidence. You know, it was his gun, maybe, but somebody else took it. He was a patsy. There was a body double, all of these things, exploding microphone and so on and so forth.

00:21:50.780 They haven't made those arguments as far as we've seen yet. And even as to some of the other main components of the evidence presented against Tyler Robinson, like his confessions and the text messages between him and Lance Twiggs or the discord messages or the even the testimony that was provided by it wasn't testimony at the time, but it was testimony provided by Lance Twiggs about the conversation with Tyler Robinson.

00:22:14.200 A lot of that hasn't been rebutted yet. And it doesn't really need to be rebutted at this time.

00:22:20.820 They can save these arguments for later down the line when the trial comes out. They will

00:22:26.080 certainly do that. But I think we can read into the fact that they didn't cross-examine some of

00:22:31.880 these main points as evidence that they don't have a lot to cross-examine on. And so one example of

00:22:37.200 this would be the text messages. The idea was that Tyler Robinson confessed essentially to his

00:22:44.860 boyfriend Lance Twiggs over text message, sent text messages, communicated inside those text

00:22:50.980 messages, a lot of non-public information about stashing the rifle in the woods, about waiting

00:22:57.480 to make sure that a police officer was not there so he could go retrieve the rifle. He was also

00:23:02.960 talking about the rifle being covered in a towel that had a bunch of DNA all over it. So these

00:23:08.400 things were not public and he was communicating those back to Lance Twiggs. Lance Twiggs also

00:23:13.880 testified at the preliminary hearing and confirmed all of that. If the defense had strong evidence

00:23:21.640 that would rebut that, if they could exonerate their client or at least smash that component

00:23:26.900 of the testimony, I think that that would have created a bunch of doubt, even at this early

00:23:32.260 stage that would have made the judge question the case a little bit more. So for example,

00:23:36.200 if they would say, we got the cell phone extraction records, we got actually the GPS

00:23:41.940 location data, and we could show you that Tyler Robinson was not at that location because we know

00:23:48.960 that the prosecution and law enforcement, they executed search warrants for everything. And this

00:23:54.120 is what I meant when I was saying that there will be a lot more evidence that comes out, but they've

00:23:58.940 got everything. As far as I can tell, they've got location data, GPS data, all of the individual

00:24:05.000 device identification numbers, everything that happened on these devices, including on the

00:24:11.360 vehicle, Lance's phones, Tyler's phone, the Discord servers, all of the cell services,

00:24:17.880 all were just gobbled up. And so that should have been, and I believe it was, already provided over

00:24:24.460 to the defense. So if there was something in there that was exculpatory, I would imagine they

00:24:29.320 would bring that up and use that because it would be damning for that piece of evidence and that

00:24:34.060 pillar that they're using. But they just simply didn't do that. One theory would be that maybe

00:24:38.380 Lance Twiggs was the person actually sending the text messages. So he's got both phones,

00:24:44.500 he's sending messages to himself, and he's having this fake conversation. So I think if there was

00:24:48.400 something there there that that would have already been introduced, otherwise it wasn't. And

00:24:54.060 doesn't mean that it doesn't come out at a later point in time, right? They might have an expert

00:24:58.640 witness who comes out when trial starts and can offer an alternative explanation for these things.

00:25:05.100 But because they haven't done those things, those are substantive explanations of the evidence.

00:25:10.400 And it would take a bit of evidence that has been admitted and just give it a better explanation.

00:25:16.020 But they didn't really do that. And the only other really big thing that they did was trying

00:25:21.320 to undermine the validity of the evidence. So to your original point, they've been trying to

00:25:26.640 preclude evidence. They don't want stuff to come in, or at least don't want it to come out into

00:25:30.580 the public arena. But they can also try to explain it away or undermine the validity of it. And we

00:25:35.600 saw some of that with the DNA evidence, where when the examiner was explaining that Tyler Robinson

00:25:42.300 was a major contributor on a lot of things, multiple areas of the gun, the screwdriver that

00:25:48.280 was found on the roof, the towel that was enveloping the gun on the actual bullet casings

00:25:53.520 that were found both in the woods and back at his home. They weren't really trying to deny that.

00:26:02.100 They were just trying to undermine the validity of DNA evidence, right? It's a science. In science,

00:26:07.400 nothing's perfect. There is a margin of error in all of this testing. And so they were hammering

00:26:12.380 the witness about that, right? It's not a hundred percent, right? And these things could be problems

00:26:16.000 where they convolute and you've got multiple samples coming out at the same time such that

00:26:20.740 you can't get a good read on these things. It was more trying to basically attack the validity of

00:26:26.640 that evidence rather than saying it's not accurate, that the DNA is not there. Kind of acknowledging

00:26:32.340 that it's there, but maybe it's not to the same levels or to the sufficiency that the prosecution

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00:27:39.340 And that is just how DNA evidence works.

00:27:43.140 They say things like it is 3 trillion times more likely

00:27:46.840 that this is Tyler Robinson's DNA than someone else.

00:27:52.600 And the defense knows that.

00:27:54.280 So is that just kind of a tactic?

00:27:56.600 I would think that would be more of a tactic for a jury

00:27:59.560 than a tactic for a judge because the judge understands how dna evidence works too but i

00:28:04.780 could see that kind of language working on a jury that well you just heard this witness it's not 100

00:28:10.180 percent that it's this person's dna so how can you convict a person without knowing for sure

00:28:15.000 so i think it's interesting that they are already kind of bringing that up right now in the pre-trial

00:28:20.500 hearing which kind of leads to my next question is do you think that there's going to be a different

00:28:25.560 strategy or different things presented by the prosecution and the defense once they

00:28:30.020 actually get to trial? And if so, what do you think those strategies are going to be?

00:28:36.960 I do think that the prosecution is very likely just going to double down and triple down on

00:28:43.300 the evidence that they've already presented. And so we started to see a little bit of a snippet

00:28:48.160 of that at the tail end of day five on the preliminary hearing. We had a bunch of video

00:28:52.920 that was played. And then at the very end, there was apparently this extra video that was played.

00:28:58.100 They turned the cameras off in response to a sanction based on the fact that that note leaked.

00:29:04.060 So Tyler Robinson wrote, according to the evidence, a handwritten note, put it under his keyboard.

00:29:09.120 That was one of the bits of evidence that was an admission. And so he then texted his boyfriend,

00:29:13.980 hey, look under the keyboard, opens up the note, pulls the note out, reads it. It's a confession,

00:29:19.420 right? This is what I did. This is why I did it. So that bit of evidence shouldn't have hit the

00:29:24.240 public yet. And it did. People got a screenshot of it because the camera just happened to be on

00:29:29.500 when they pulled up the exhibit. So the judge then essentially sanctioned the prosecution at

00:29:34.780 the very end of the hearing. We then saw there were a bunch of people in the courtroom who got

00:29:39.520 to see that enhanced version of the video. And there were a bunch of other exhibits that we

00:29:44.180 just didn't see. And there were other exhibits that were kind of glossed over. For example,

00:29:48.600 in the Lance Twiggs testimony, because it was a preliminary hearing, this was the boyfriend,

00:29:54.100 he was allowed to testify in video form without cross-examination because hearsay is admissible

00:30:00.460 in a preliminary hearing. This is not a trial. And so that will not be allowed at the trial.

00:30:06.040 He's not going to be allowed to just play a video. So they're going to have to bring Lance

00:30:09.140 Twiggs back into the courtroom and he'll be subject to cross-examination. And I think it's

00:30:14.460 going to be ripe for a lot of very aggressive cross-examination. And so putting on the defense

00:30:19.940 hat, Lance Twiggs, if I am with the defense, is going to be one of the main scapegoats of this

00:30:26.900 entire trial because seemingly he was pretty complicit in a lot of what was happening. In

00:30:33.120 fact, he was almost helping conceal a wanted fugitive, right? Tyler Robinson, according to

00:30:37.520 his story, admitted that he did this thing, that he was wanted on the run. And then Lance was

00:30:43.460 helping to keep the whole thing a secret, you know, kind of facilitating the escape of a felon

00:30:48.420 and covering up and concealing somebody who was a wanted person at the time. So he could have been

00:30:53.240 charged with crimes and he wasn't. Instead, he got immunity. And so from the defense perspective,

00:30:58.440 I think they're going to really hammer on that. They did not have that opportunity during the

00:31:01.880 preliminary hearing because it was just a video testimony. But when he's there in person,

00:31:06.060 I think that they're going to try to shred him to bits and to say that everything coming out of

00:31:10.680 his mouth is biased. It's prejudiced. It's something that he's saying just to save his own

00:31:15.840 skin. In fact, he's much more complicit in this. And there is evidence that his DNA was also on a

00:31:21.300 bunch of other items, not to the same degree that Tyler Robinson's was, but they lived together.

00:31:26.560 They were in the same house. They were lovers. And so DNA is all over the place. But the idea

00:31:32.100 that they're just going to let that part of the testimony stand, I think is not realistic. He's

00:31:37.980 going to come in and unless tyler robinson's theory is still somehow to protect lance twigs

00:31:44.140 which maybe it is then i think the lance twigs will be the subject of a lot of cross and a lot

00:31:50.780 of undermining his credibility to make him more complicit in their theory maybe than tyler

00:31:57.320 robinson was maybe that tyler robinson was acting on behalf of lance twigs he was you know under

00:32:01.940 duress he was coerced to do this for his boyfriend or something to that effect to mitigate the

00:32:07.160 seriousness or at least the aggravators of the murder charge to maybe beat a severe penalty

00:32:14.360 when it comes down to sentencing, to make him more complicit than not. And from the defense

00:32:21.060 perspective, we haven't really seen a lot of theory. What is the theory of the case? If it's

00:32:26.060 not a 30-06 round, what is it? If there's another shooter, who is that other shooter?

00:32:32.520 There's other interesting developments. I think in the preliminary hearing that we learned about, there was a gun with a holster in a holster found in the courtyard where Charlie Kirk was shot. There was also a 223 round, I believe, was found on the roof of another building that was accounted for as an officer rechambering his rifle.

00:32:55.100 And so it spit out another round on the roof of another building.

00:32:59.740 And from the defense perspective, I think that a big part of their argument will be about the absence of evidence making their job essentially impossible, that these other angles were not investigated.

00:33:11.460 And because Tyler Robinson turned himself in, what that did is create this chain of events that ultimately led him to being the subject without an investigation into any other possibilities.

00:33:22.460 And once he was turning himself in, it then stopped the investigation. And so it didn't give them any evidence to exculpate their client. There was nothing else that they could latch on to related to maybe the other round, maybe related to the other holster.

00:33:38.800 Maybe they didn't investigate somebody who looks like Tyler Robinson.

00:33:42.500 Many people are saying there's a body double with a different height that was also walking

00:33:46.920 around campus that day.

00:33:48.280 And the point from the defense will be, we don't know if that is true or not, but you

00:33:53.440 didn't investigate these loose ends.

00:33:55.520 As soon as you had your guy, everything came to a skidding halt.

00:33:59.300 And so we have no opportunity because of your failed investigation to do our due diligence

00:34:05.740 to exonerate our client and try to create some reasonable doubt around that angle.

00:34:12.060 Well, but then you've got to pour all of the admissions and the confessions against those

00:34:17.580 things. So then you've got Tyler Robinson, who, according to Lance Twiggs, was working on

00:34:25.000 engraving bullets with a Dremel in their household a week before at least the shooting actually

00:34:32.120 occurred. So you've got testimony that will come out saying that this was a kind of a premeditated

00:34:37.740 thing and that Tyler Robinson was involved in it at every step of the way. And then he goes,

00:34:43.680 actually commits the shooting. Then immediately after the shooting, makes an admission to Lance

00:34:49.680 Twiggs in text message saying, I did it. Look, you know, get the handwritten note. The handwritten

00:34:55.260 note is another admission that was at another point in time. Then before he turns himself in,

00:35:00.660 Story goes that he sent a message to a discord group of about 20 people with another admission.

00:35:06.640 Then you've also got Lance Twig saying that they met each other after the shooting in person and that Tyler Robinson, again, essentially confessed to him saying, I did it and was even sad about it, was even crying and almost remorseful and very nervous, kind of doing a bunch of things around the house in order to keep his mind off it.

00:35:23.160 Then you've also got the parents who helped to turn him in. Presumably, we don't know the details about that specific evidence yet, but the parents presumably got another admission. So Tyler Robinson is not being turned in for nothing. He said he had some role in this.

00:35:40.400 And so whether or not that evidence all comes out, I think, is yet to be seen. But I would fully expect the prosecution to then layer that on top of all of the other evidence, the DNA evidence, the surveillance evidence. I think that the electronic forensic evidence is going to be extremely compelling because you're going to be able to pinpoint his vehicle, track his phone.

00:36:02.760 I think it will rebut the idea that somebody was in the same position, in the same location, texting themselves. Two people, two different locations. And it, I believe, is going to corroborate very closely with where the rifle was found.

00:36:18.500 In other words, the cell phone will be on campus. The cell phone will be in the woods. The cell phone will be in a car as he's texting, waiting to go retrieve the rifle. And so there'll be this convergence of evidence from the prosecution side that will be very significant. And the defense will have to go through each one of those and knock them out one by one or have a better explanation saying, you know, maybe Tyler Robinson was drugged in the back of a car or something.

00:36:44.620 And somebody else was was moving him around into these locations. But it's going to ultimately come out. We'll see what their theories are. But a lot of that should could and might just be being saved for motions practice and for a trial.

00:36:57.920 yeah and just as a reminder to people i always have to remind myself of this when we're looking

00:37:05.300 at these trials the defense's job is not to prove tyler innocent and they don't actually

00:37:11.660 have to give evidence for alternative theories they don't have to say no we think this guy did

00:37:18.280 it and here's here's our case for that guy all they're doing and you can correct me if i'm wrong

00:37:23.220 in my wording in this, is trying to present a reasonable doubt. They are trying to tell the

00:37:29.600 jury, correct, that there is a reasonable doubt that this person committed this crime and therefore

00:37:35.080 they should not be found guilty. It's guilty or not guilty in a court of law. It's not necessarily

00:37:40.000 guilty or innocent. And so they just have to put as much doubt against the prosecution as possible

00:37:47.000 and against Tyler Robinson being 100% guilty as possible in order to do their jobs well.

00:37:54.080 But then you're saying like the prosecution could easily come back and say,

00:37:57.440 look, it's not reasonable.

00:37:59.180 We've got all this evidence.

00:38:00.420 We've got the surveillance footage.

00:38:01.780 We've got his former lover saying this.

00:38:04.140 Why would he have turned himself in if it was another guy on the roof?

00:38:07.400 If it was another bullet?

00:38:08.760 That doesn't make any sense.

00:38:10.240 If he wasn't really the one taking the shot,

00:38:12.280 then why would he have you know why would he have confessed on discord why would he have sent these

00:38:18.380 text messages and all of that so it's not either like the prosecution doesn't even necessarily have

00:38:24.720 to go through all of the defenses theories one by one specifically they just have to be able to say

00:38:30.580 it is not reasonable to believe anything the defense is saying in defense of tyler robinson

00:38:36.660 is that correct yeah that's exactly right and there's this interesting thing that some judges

00:38:41.840 will do during jury selection. I don't expect to see it in this case, but they'll ask a full panel

00:38:47.180 of jurors. They'll say, OK, how many people here think that this man who's about to stand trial

00:38:52.360 is guilty? Right. And there'll be a portion of jurors who raise their hands right now. He's

00:38:56.340 guilty. Cops charged him. He's sitting here in court. So he must have done something wrong.

00:39:00.820 And so they'll raise their hand. Then the judge will say, how many of you don't know whether this

00:39:05.460 person is innocent or guilty? And, you know, usually a bunch of hands will go up. But that's

00:39:09.800 also the wrong answer because the right answer is even at trial, even while he's seated there,

00:39:14.380 he is presumed innocent at that very moment. And so the burden of proof resides with the

00:39:20.040 prosecution. And that's a little bit different than what we saw with the preliminary hearing.

00:39:24.000 At the preliminary hearing that we just went through, the evidence is looked in a light most

00:39:29.300 favorable to the prosecutors. So if the judge is receiving this evidence, there's some doubts about

00:39:34.020 it. He's going to say, well, this is their interpretation. And because it's at such an

00:39:37.820 early stage, we're going to give the government the benefit of the doubt. But once we get into

00:39:42.260 the trial, then it's kind of an inverted standard. And it is the beyond a reasonable doubt standard,

00:39:47.340 which is a much higher standard. And in practice, the defense, I think, does a better job if they

00:39:55.700 do have an alternative theory. They can go through and kind of knock out each one of the government's

00:40:01.220 main components. They could say that the DNA evidence is bad. So what if his evidence, the

00:40:07.320 DNA is on the screwdriver. So what if it's on the gun? It doesn't make him the shooter. It doesn't

00:40:14.320 put him on the rooftop at that time. They could say, we've got all this surveillance footage.

00:40:18.720 And so we can see him walking around campus. They'll say, so what? That's not him. It's a

00:40:23.020 body double. Look, the heights are wrong. The heights don't match up or it's a different body

00:40:27.960 structure or he's got a different gait. Bring in an expert to talk about that. Say that the text

00:40:33.140 messages were all spoofed, right? We've got the cell phone records. And so we've got no admission

00:40:38.860 on the cell phone records, or he was drugged or something. He was in some sort of diluted state.

00:40:44.120 So his in-person admissions to Lance Twiggs were all perverted and something that is unreliable

00:40:50.440 and shouldn't be held against him because the government hasn't met their burden on these

00:40:54.100 things. And they can go through and just knock, knock, knock, knock, knock out and kind of cut

00:40:58.460 the legs out from each pillar that is presented by the government. But largely, I think that the

00:41:03.660 defense can do better if they have a theory, if they have a thesis. Like if Tyler Robinson is

00:41:09.180 factually innocent, if he is not the shooter, who was the shooter? And does he have an alibi? Like

00:41:15.220 where was Tyler Robinson on that day? Was he at work? Was he with his family? We know he wasn't

00:41:20.540 at work. We know he wasn't with his family. Lance Twiggs says he wasn't with Lance Twiggs.

00:41:24.700 So if the defense is going to come up with an alternative, what is that going to be and who is it going to be? And I think that Lance Twiggs would be the most obvious option that he's being immunized. He's being granted protection from future charges. And it's a quid pro quo, essentially. He's not doing that for free.

00:41:44.540 he's getting a protection in order to say certain things. And so you undermine his credibility

00:41:48.960 and substitute some of Tyler Robinson's guilt with Lance Twiggs' guilt. And then you create

00:41:55.540 doubt about the entire case based on that reframe. And you present that to the jury. So the jury has

00:42:02.620 something to latch onto rather than just, we don't have an explanation, but it wasn't our guide.

00:42:08.700 So as this advances, I think that we'll start to see what the defense arguments are.

00:42:14.700 But I think as the record develops more, we start to see that there are harder things

00:42:20.720 to rebut.

00:42:21.420 Like one of the main theories on the internet largely was that it wasn't a .30-06.

00:42:26.540 And there's a lot of questions about that because of the size, the caliber of the bullet,

00:42:31.260 because of the wound.

00:42:32.280 You have experts kind of across both sides of the spectrum.

00:42:36.080 many people who are gun experts with gun credentials on either side, with completely

00:42:42.780 different interpretations, saying that what we saw happen to Charlie is perfectly reasonable.

00:42:48.160 Bullets do strange things, even if it's a big round, goes in, hits bone, deflects,

00:42:53.820 bounces around inside the body, doesn't actually create an exit wound. And you have a whole

00:42:58.980 separate side of other people saying that it would 100% create an exit wound every single

00:43:04.820 time you shoot, and that it's a factual impossibility that it would not create an exit

00:43:09.420 wound. And so we may see that debated, but they'll also then, as we now know, have to contend with

00:43:17.160 the fact that they pulled a bullet that they classed as a .30-06 bullet and various bullet

00:43:23.360 fragments out of Charlie's body. So that fact then will have to be contended with. If it's not

00:43:29.380 Tyler Robinson with the 30-06 on the roof. Who was it and how did that 30-06 round get inside

00:43:35.440 Charlie's body such that they can disqualify that, right? Every one of these little avenues

00:43:41.840 needs to be disproven, essentially, or at least reasonable doubt needs to be created

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00:45:12.720 Who do you think we will see take the stand for either side?

00:45:18.080 well i think it's going to be a lot of the same people that we saw i think that the

00:45:24.040 maybe the well two or three big ones i think will be lance twigs as we've already mentioned

00:45:30.100 and talked a lot about he was not cross-examined his testimony was cut off they played a 20-minute

00:45:36.440 video of him but huge portions of it were fast forwarded through and it felt light it felt very

00:45:42.780 light to us. So I think that he'll be on the stand for quite a long time. And there'll be

00:45:47.900 a lot of questions about what he knew and when he knew and why he was covering up for his boyfriend

00:45:53.040 until it was basically a foregone conclusion. When Tyler Robinson said that he was going to

00:45:57.560 turn himself in, then it all kind of came to a close. So I think we'll hear from him. I think

00:46:03.480 we'll also very likely hear, I would imagine that the government subpoenas and calls in Tyler

00:46:09.560 Robinson's parents. There's some questions about what happened there, whether or not he confessed

00:46:16.120 to the parents. We would suspect that he did based on the fact that the parents felt it was

00:46:21.680 sufficient enough to ultimately turn him into law enforcement. But there was also reporting that

00:46:27.300 Tyler Robinson's mother was responsible for identifying him. Once the FBI started sharing

00:46:33.260 those videos of the suspect who was still at large, she saw the photograph and reportedly

00:46:38.540 thought it was her son. And so she called her son to say, hey, where are you? What are you doing?

00:46:43.180 And I think the reporting was that he responded to her and said that I'm sick, right? So I'm not

00:46:48.780 there. I'm sick. I'm fine. But it wasn't me, essentially. So she could even make that

00:46:53.300 identification. Lance Twiggs could make that identification. He said so in his testimony that

00:46:58.320 he was looking at the surveillance photos and said, yeah, we're in the same pants. We're in

00:47:02.340 the same converse, wearing the same Hurley hat, and so recognized him by his figure and his

00:47:08.320 clothing. And so I would imagine we hear from the parents. We may also hear from the law enforcement

00:47:14.600 officials. So the parents, father too, sat down with their son, Tyler, evidently, and were talking

00:47:20.560 to him about this. And they were concerned that they might be raided soon. The evidence would

00:47:24.120 come back to them at some point. So they called a law enforcement friend who then brought them out

00:47:28.340 and help to turn them in. And so there's also questions about that story, about what ultimately

00:47:34.480 happened here, what were confessions that were made, and whether they'll testify and what they'll

00:47:41.700 say, what they'll actually say, whether it is something that implicates their son. You can

00:47:46.660 imagine that's probably the hardest thing that a parent could do is to take the stand and say,

00:47:50.640 my son told me he did this thing. And then you act as a witness against your own child

00:47:54.620 in, you know, the biggest political assassination of our lifetime. So I would expect them. I think

00:48:00.560 we'll also get a lot of details, you know, DNA evidence that'll come back. All the ballistic

00:48:05.360 stuff will have a lot of that to really unpack. And there are some questions about some of the

00:48:09.660 ballistics. There was some reporting about the ballistics fragmenting. So, you know, a bullet

00:48:17.420 is lead wrapped in a copper jacket. And so once the bullet hits, the jacket kind of, you know,

00:48:23.000 dissipates and breaks off and it created these other lead fragments inside of charlie's body

00:48:28.660 i think the defense will bring their own expert to at least talk about that i don't know if they're

00:48:33.460 going to want to say something like it wasn't a 30-06 round and it was some some other shooter

00:48:39.180 with a different caliber gun but i think that they will try to attack the ballistic evidence

00:48:44.000 they'll say that when the and this is documented in the case but when the actual uh bullet jacket

00:48:52.340 was pulled back out, so the bullet kind of explodes and turns into this mushroom,

00:48:57.660 it creates these very brittle petals on the back end of the bullet. So when they then put that into

00:49:04.120 an evidence envelope and transport that over from the medical examiner over to FBI ATF,

00:49:11.040 there's some documentation that some of those fragments broke off. So it created actually

00:49:16.640 more fragments and or that there was a receipt of fewer fragments that ultimately came to the

00:49:24.620 ATF. There was some very short testimony about that, that the person who was doing the examination

00:49:30.060 on the bullet and the fragments got less fragments than were originally pulled out. And so

00:49:35.460 chain of custody is really what this boils down to. Evidence gets transferred from one person,

00:49:41.680 from A to B, B to C, C to D, D to E,

00:49:44.700 and the defense is looking for things

00:49:46.440 in that chain that are perverted.

00:49:48.820 And if you can make the argument

00:49:50.100 that it was so perverted

00:49:51.740 that some evidence is being denied

00:49:54.060 or inaccessible or was deleted or covered up,

00:49:57.860 then the argument is you can invalidate

00:49:59.720 that entire chain of evidence.

00:50:01.320 It's fruit of the poisonous tree.

00:50:02.900 It's something that is suppressible

00:50:04.720 and something that can be precluded.

00:50:06.760 So if that expert from the defense

00:50:09.000 comes in and discusses that,

00:50:11.160 or even before trial, we litigate this out and we say that this is not admissible, right? That's

00:50:17.020 going to be a big win for them. And so I think we'll see a lot of that. We'll see a lot of

00:50:21.320 more motions practice, more litigation in writing that says search warrants were invalid. You didn't

00:50:27.780 have a good basis to go get this cell phone record or the GPS data from the car and so on

00:50:33.760 and so forth to just kind of slowly knock these things out. But I would fully expect to also hear

00:50:39.320 from the cell phone and the data technicians,

00:50:43.840 the people who are getting the warrants

00:50:45.120 and analyzing the data.

00:50:46.300 Because I think if what the search warrants

00:50:48.540 are saying that they got,

00:50:50.420 if what was received matches what they got,

00:50:54.140 it's going to be very difficult for the defense

00:50:57.060 to overcome some of the location data.

00:50:59.880 They very well may put Tyler Robinson right there,

00:51:02.700 right in the stairwell, right on campus,

00:51:04.580 right over by the woods this entire time.

00:51:06.940 But I would expect to see a lot.

00:51:08.760 we're going to see a lot of additional witnesses. And it's going to be, I think,

00:51:11.240 a very long trial if it gets that far. And we won't hear from Tyler Robinson, correct?

00:51:20.040 Good question. Probably not. We don't generally see defendants testify. That's usually the best

00:51:26.900 advice from defense attorneys to their client. There are exceptions to that rule. If you remember

00:51:31.300 the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting that took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I believe,

00:51:36.680 he took the stand and he was ultimately acquitted in that case because he explained himself he had

00:51:44.220 an alternative theory it wasn't just that uh you know he's not guilty because he was exercising

00:51:50.620 self-defense he actually got in front of the jury and got very emotional cried on the stand explained

00:51:56.560 his level of fear and told the story through his eyes and his defense team credited that testimony

00:52:03.040 with the not guilty verdict in that case.

00:52:06.520 Now, I don't know that Tyler Robinson

00:52:08.160 has anything like that to add, right?

00:52:10.980 It's not a self-defense case.

00:52:12.280 It's not like he was running around

00:52:13.460 getting chased down by three different people.

00:52:15.980 But if he's factually innocent,

00:52:18.900 there's really not a lot of downside

00:52:21.040 to having him testify.

00:52:22.500 He's already facing the maximum penalty under the law.

00:52:26.700 They're seeking the death penalty here.

00:52:28.580 So if he can come out and communicate

00:52:31.980 even about the death penalty capital aggravator. So in Utah, the reason it's a capital case

00:52:38.240 is because he committed a murder, allegedly, but did so in the process of doing so knowingly

00:52:45.360 endangered people around him. In other words, that there were kids in the crowd, there were

00:52:50.020 a bunch of people, there was the person asking him the question right before Charlie was killed.

00:52:55.580 And so he's up on the perch, as the story goes, shooting past all of these other people,

00:52:59.680 knowingly creating a danger for everybody else in the arena, in the location, and that aggravates

00:53:06.640 things and makes it capital eligible. So if he wanted to take the stand, for example, and

00:53:12.620 at least communicate about that point, about that element of the entire prosecution to say that he

00:53:18.860 couldn't see anybody and he didn't know or explain that away in some other argument, then that might

00:53:25.940 minimize his capital exposure. But again, I think that's going to be a difficult one to overcome

00:53:33.000 because he knew it was a big event. And if you accept everything else is true, that he was

00:53:38.680 walking around the campus that day and he saw the event, he saw what was going on there,

00:53:43.500 it would have been difficult to believe that he didn't know that he was shooting past a huge

00:53:47.600 group of people. But there may be some other reason for him to testify unless he, and his

00:53:52.080 theory is that I'm not the shooter, right? If he's got a very serious alternative explanation,

00:53:58.380 it might be the best witness to explain where he was that day. We can't put him in any other

00:54:02.600 location. He may be the only one to explain that. And what happened that justifies this argument

00:54:08.740 that it's a body double or that it wasn't him, the DNA matches and these things, there's maybe

00:54:13.120 an explanation for that, that the defense just hasn't unleashed yet.

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00:55:31.180 Do you think, I've seen this question a lot, that all of the chatter online about this

00:55:36.120 makes it really difficult to get a jury that really is impartial, that can kind of come in

00:55:45.540 and say, look, I'm just going to see the evidence as it stands and then make my decision based on

00:55:51.140 the arguments. I know that's a big concern that maybe the defense has, but a lot of people who

00:55:56.040 care about due process have. Yeah, it is a very interesting and I think astute question because

00:56:02.860 ordinarily the answer is it shouldn't, you know, know that we shouldn't have a conversation about

00:56:09.320 the case ultimately impact the jury. We had, if you remember the George Floyd case where we had

00:56:15.500 video of Derek Chauvin, you know, every single day, essentially for months on end with his knee

00:56:21.700 on George Floyd. And that resulted in a trial. And the judge said we could validly put together

00:56:28.820 a jury. And normally the protections in this process occur in a process called void deer.

00:56:34.160 So the judge and the defense and the prosecution will all be asking prospective jurors questions

00:56:39.800 about what they've seen, whether they can be fair and impartial. And I guarantee you that it's going

00:56:45.480 to be very extensive. Lots of questions from both sides. People will be asking, do you watch

00:56:51.380 Turning Point? Are you a Turning Point fan? Did you ever subscribe to Charlie Kirk? Did you ever

00:56:55.520 see a Charlie Kirk video? On the other hand, do you watch Candace Owens? Do you watch these other

00:57:00.660 commenters about this case? Where are you at politically aligned in this process? And those

00:57:08.300 people will very likely be disqualified, I think, on both ends. Anybody who's overly friendly to

00:57:13.200 Charlie as a victim will likely go. Anybody who's very questioning about the government's case will

00:57:19.120 probably go. And we'll have a lot of unpacking of those issues. Now, that was supposed to

00:57:25.340 protect the case in Derek Chauvin, where we were supposed to make sure that we could go through

00:57:30.100 that process to whittle out any problematic jurors. But that doesn't always work, honestly.

00:57:36.080 The story after Derek Chauvin was convicted was that there was one juror who was not honest or accurate on those forms and didn't actually tell the truth.

00:57:47.320 And there was one juror who actually was found after the trial was over to have been at a George Floyd protest, was actually out there on behalf of George Floyd and even had a T-shirt on called, you know, like, get your knee off our necks, like a T-shirt that he was wearing.

00:58:03.700 So when he went through the void-deer process, he was asked about all that.

00:58:07.260 And he said, I'm, you know, I'm perfectly impartial.

00:58:10.060 I'm perfectly neutral.

00:58:11.240 He got put on the jury.

00:58:12.800 Derek Chauvin, as we know, was convicted and went to prison for a very long time and has

00:58:19.440 no appellate rights, has not been able to get any of that reversed on the fact that

00:58:23.840 his jury was very clearly tainted.

00:58:26.320 And we've seen similar patterns in the Galen Maxwell trial.

00:58:29.300 There was a juror who was literally in her jury room who was telling other jurors about his victimhood as somebody who was a victim of sexual abuse.

00:58:41.720 That was on the voir dire list.

00:58:44.420 Have you ever been a victim of sexual abuse?

00:58:47.240 He flies through it.

00:58:48.480 He says no, gets onto the jury.

00:58:50.980 Turns out the answer is yes.

00:58:52.700 Her conviction stands as well.

00:58:54.140 So a lot of these protections sound really great. And like, you should be able to solve this just by asking people to be honest and truthful and accurate. And it should protect everything. But then you see, you know, they slip through the cracks and you have to ask yourself whether or not that ultimately impacted the final verdict.

00:59:11.220 in this case, is the assassination of our time. I mean, it's maybe the most politically volatile

00:59:17.680 criminal prosecution that we've ever seen, especially related to the death of somebody

00:59:23.920 that everybody knew and had a lot of opinions about. But how do you de-charge that in this

00:59:30.500 process? And how do you prevent people from being dishonest or lacking in truth when they're going

00:59:36.080 through the process. It's going to be some work for the judge to cut through. Right. Another

00:59:42.960 person that could affect the outcome of this case is Erica Kirk, correct? Because Utah has 0.96

00:59:49.260 victim's rights. Could you talk about what that could look like?

00:59:54.400 Yeah, I think victim's rights are, you would say, subordinate to the defendant's rights. So

01:00:01.360 the defendant who's currently being prosecuted has the right to due process, has the right

01:00:07.140 to have the format unfold in a way that doesn't jeopardize him or the actual finding of innocence

01:00:14.140 or guilt. Victims' rights, I would say, will likely come into more play during the plea

01:00:22.560 negotiation process or during sentencing. She has a right to be in attendance at these things.

01:00:28.020 she has a right to participate in the proceedings and to make her voice known as, you know, the 0.86

01:00:33.260 victim of a brutal assassination. But more likely than not, you know, we saw this emerge in the

01:00:40.820 preliminary hearing. Her defense team was making the argument that certain things should happen a

01:00:45.220 certain way. And from my read, the judge was saying, thank you for your input, but we're going

01:00:49.340 to go back to the parties who are actually litigating this case. Now, if there is a plea deal,

01:00:54.340 So as I mentioned at the outset, Judge Graff said something like, you know, sometimes you have to spend time in order to save time. So now that all of this has been laid bare, if the defense team is seeking or communicating with Tyler Robinson about a plea deal and they say, hey, we'll take a life in prison deal with no parole if you just give us and drop the death penalty, goes back over to the prosecutor.

01:01:20.720 The prosecutor will then say, let me talk to the victims about this. The victim will then have an input. So Erica Kirk could say, you know, I'm OK with that outcome or I'm not OK with that outcome. Of course, prosecutions offices are generally not bound by that, but it's a nice kind of courtesy so that the victim is a part of the process in getting justice because ultimately her husband was taken from her.

01:01:44.360 So whether a plea deal is contemplated or not, I think we'll see.

01:01:50.540 But then, of course, at sentencing, when the judge is now having to flesh out the sentence,

01:01:56.100 I think she'll have a big role in that, in talking about the impact and the harm and

01:01:59.720 the damage it's caused to her and her family.

01:02:03.000 And there was a motion just filed by her and her lawyers saying, we also have a right to 0.82

01:02:10.000 a speedy trial.

01:02:10.800 We have a right to have justice delivered in this case.

01:02:13.640 expeditiously. And, you know, that is true, but the real invocation of the speedy trial right

01:02:21.960 is for the defendant. And so in this case, Tyler Robinson has been waiving a lot of those speedy

01:02:27.860 trial rights, right? You don't want to end up in a situation in our legal system where you're

01:02:32.460 charged with a crime and the government just waits, you know, 15 years, like the county

01:02:36.840 Monte Cristo, where you're just kind of locked away forever without any process ultimately

01:02:41.960 unfolding. The defense can waive that speedy trial right. So this thing could take years.

01:02:47.640 Erica Kirk can have her say in that process. And Erica Kirk, I've been really appreciative of her 0.76

01:02:52.240 because she's also been making her voice heard in saying she wants all of these opened, opened up

01:02:57.820 to the public. She wants cameras in the courtroom. And her team have submitted briefs to that regard 0.99

01:03:04.420 saying, you know, my husband was shot and killed on camera. There should at least be cameras in

01:03:08.760 the courtroom. And so as both sides are kind of duking this thing out, and there was a time at

01:03:13.100 the very beginning where the prosecution was also saying, we may not want cameras in the courtroom,

01:03:17.640 we may want to lock this thing down even more, we were outraged about that. But then I think when

01:03:21.940 Erica and her people come in, and they say, we actually want more accessibility, we want more

01:03:25.980 transparency, I'm sure that carries weight for the judge. And so, you know, kind of those things

01:03:30.840 around the margin are all relevant. And I think Erica has a say in that. But her most recent

01:03:39.040 motion was about really the fact that this thing is going to be settled in September.

01:03:44.900 And a lot of people were outraged about that. They said, we just sat through this five-day

01:03:48.680 preliminary hearing. What's taking so long? Now we're going to have briefings from both sides.

01:03:52.820 Then we'll have oral arguments, future down the line. But then Erica said she wants this to be

01:03:58.880 settled quickly, but she was also essentially in agreement with the judge's decision. So if you

01:04:04.280 look at the final sentence of her motion, she said, we want expeditious ruling on it, but

01:04:09.360 please make it no later than the date you've already scheduled, which I think is September

01:04:13.660 1st or some early date in September. So she's not asking for things that are accelerated.

01:04:20.260 Like in other words, the judge didn't say we're going to do it in September. And Erica,

01:04:23.240 her filing was not that we want to do it in August. It was just, hey, we want to make our

01:04:29.040 position known. Please don't delay it any further than this, because we also have a right for a

01:04:34.220 speedy resolution on this issue. Right. Thank you so much. That was such interesting and helpful

01:04:40.140 insight. We'll continue to track this. We'd love to have you back on in the months to come,

01:04:45.100 hopefully not the years to come, because I'm with Erica. I hope that this truly is

01:04:48.860 a speedy trial, that it's not justice deferred. So thank you so much for following this,

01:04:54.760 for tracking this and giving us your perspective from your criminal defense background. Really,

01:04:59.980 really helpful. Thank you, Ali. I really appreciate the time.

01:05:05.360 Thanks. Okay. Everyone go subscribe to Robert's channel. We'll make sure to

01:05:10.080 link it in the description of our episode. Thank you so much.

01:05:18.860 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - July 17, 2026

Ep 1372 ｜ Is Tyler Robinson Protecting Lance Twiggs？ Criminal Defense Attorney Explains ｜ Robert Gouveia

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