Share and Follow
Idaho prosecutor Jeff Nye on prosecuting the Kohberger case
Jeff Nye, the chief of the Idaho Attorney General’s Criminal Law Division, played a key role in overcoming a defense motion that could have completely altered the case against Bryan Kohberger if the judge had ruled against prosecutors.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Failure wasn’t an option.
With the entire case against Bryan Kohberger on the line, an Idaho prosecutor held steady and helped convince a judge to allow controversial DNA evidence to stand – despite the FBI violating its own policy to obtain it.
Jeff Nye, chief of the criminal division at the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, was the legal big gun brought in to back up Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson as Kohberger’s defense threw a “kitchen sink” strategy at the court – challenging everything and hoping something would stick.
“Just pure evil is the way that I would describe him,” Nye said of Kohberger. “I think it was surreal, especially going up to Latah County, you know, small courtroom, small town. When I kind of get into my groove, everything else kind of melts away. I forget kind of the external details, but then I go to sit down for my argument and I see him sitting there, and I immediately think about what he did that night and the horrible, horrible acts that he committed against these totally innocent people.”
Before the promotion, he said he led the special prosecutions unit and had a ground-level view of what smaller jurisdictions were asking for when they came to the state for help. It made sense, he said, to want to have control over a case, but he also believes that a community’s ability to bring killers to justice should not be based on its population and budget.
“I personally feel pretty strongly that the state should step in in these bigger cases and offer to assist,” he said. “And so that’s what happened in this case.”
A Latah County deputy watches over the crime scene on Thanksgiving morning in November 2022. (Michael Ruiz/Fox News Digital)
Nye, deputy AG Madison Gourley and former deputy AG Ingrid Batey, who is now a member of the Canyon County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, all assisted on behalf of the attorney general’s office.
Thompson, the Latah County prosecuting attorney, led the case. His senior deputy, Ashley Jennings, also played a major role, handling a massive discovery process and battling more of Kohberger’s pretrial motions. And former U.S. Attorney Joshua D. Hurwit was commissioned as a special deputy prosecutor to assist if the case had gone to trial.
