D4vd Now Has a Public Defender, Bryan Kohberger Wants His Guilty Plea Back and His Judge Off the Case, a Surgeon Gives Up His Jury

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. Quick word on Plymouth before anything else. As of the moment we recorded this, the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case was still out. They finished a fourth day of deliberations without a verdict, and they sent no notes on Monday. That case could break at any hour, including while you are listening to this. And when it does, we will have it in full. Today, we are going somewhere else. Because three defendants in three states just did something you almost never see. All of them, in the space of about a week, tried to change the basic rules of their own cases. In Los Angeles, a 21-year-old musician who by his own case's evidence has earned more than $ 10 million dollars stood in a courtroom and asked for a public defender. His high-powered attorneys walked.

1:06 The family of the 14-year-old girl he is charged with killing says he is not broke at all. In Boise, Brian Koberger, who confessed in open court to murdering four University of Idaho students and was sentenced to four consecutive life terms, is trying to take it all back. He says he is innocent, that his own lawyers misled him, and last week his new attorney moved to disqualify the judge who sentenced him. And in Pinellas County, Florida, a plastic surgeon facing a death penalty prosecution has fired his lawyers, withdrawn his own motions, withdrawn all opposition to being executed, and on Monday, waived his right to a jury entirely. The judge asked him why. He would not say. Let's get into it. Celeste Hernandez was 14 years old. She lived with her family in Lake Elsinore, California. She has been dead since April of last year, and her remains were found in September of 2025 inside a Tesla registered to an address in the Hollywood Hills. David Anthony Burke is 21. He performs under a stage name that is stylized with numbers, and he is one of the more successful young musicians of the last few years. He has pleaded not guilty to murder, to continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14, and to unlawful mutilation of human remains. In July, a Los Angeles County judge ruled there was enough evidence to send him to trial.

2:34 Prosecutors allege he killed Celeste because he feared their relationship becoming public would end his career. I am not going to walk you through the evidence in this case. Some of it has been described in open court, and it is available if you want it, and I do not think there is a single thing our audience gains from hearing me describe what was done to a 14-year-old girl. What matters today is what happened Monday. and Monday was about money. Burke came into court for what should have been a routine pre-trial hearing. His attorneys had a meeting with Judge Charlene Almedo in Chambers. And when they came out, defense attorney Blair Burke told the courtroom that her client wanted a public defender. The judge asked Burke directly if that was what he wanted. He said yes. Burke and her co-counsel withdrew on the spot. Burke, in an orange jumpsuit and shackles, smiled and shook their hands as court adjourned.

3:29 Burke said afterward that the court had granted their request to withdraw after it was determined he qualified for appointed counsel and that they continued to support him. The Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office took the case, and I want to give you their statement because it was a genuinely graceful thing to say in an ugly moment. They said they recognize the loss of life underlying the allegations and extend their sympathies to those who are grieving. And then they said that David Burke is entitled to a defense that takes his circumstances seriously and examines the evidence carefully, and that they are committed to providing it. That is exactly right, by the way. Every word of it. A public defender's office that takes a case like this one and says both of those things in the same breath is doing the job properly. Now. Here is the part that should stop you. Public defenders exist for people who cannot afford a lawyer. That is the entire point of the institution. It is a constitutional guarantee that your poverty does not determine whether you get a defense. And according to testimony given in this very case, David Burke has earned at least $ 10 million over his career. So the court found him indigent, which means either that $ 10 million is gone in about 18 months or that it is somewhere a court could not find it. Celeste Arivas Hernandez's family has an opinion about which one it is. They issued a statement saying he is not indigent at all and that he has moved his money into various corporations.

5:03 I want to be careful here because that is an allegation by a grieving family and not a finding by any court. A judge reviewed his financial situation and concluded he qualified. That determination was made on evidence I have not seen. But look, I'm going to be honest with you about why this matters beyond one case. There is a version of this that is completely legitimate. Legal defense in a capital eligible murder case costs a staggering amount of money. Blair Burke is one of the most expensive criminal lawyers in Los Angeles. A young man could absolutely burn through millions in a year of pretrial litigation and be genuinely broke. And there is a version of this that is a shell game, where the money sits in an LLC and the LLC owns the assets, and the man who controls the LLC stands in front of a judge and correctly states that he personally has nothing. That is not fraud. That is structuring, and people with good lawyers do it every day. Accountability doesn't have a legal department.

6:05 But it turns out that indigency sometimes does. And there is a real cost when a wealthy defendant qualifies, whether legitimately or not. The Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office is one of the busiest in the country, and every hour its investigators and attorneys spend on this case is an hour not spent on somebody who never had $ 10 million and never will. That office will do this job well because that is what they do. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic. There is one more wrinkle worth understanding because it explains why the withdrawal was so abrupt. Burke's now former attorneys had been building a specific defense, and you could see it in the preliminary hearing. Prosecutors laid out that on the night in question, a rideshare was sent to pick Celeste up from her family's home in Lake Elsinore and bring her to a residence in the Hollywood Hills. and that records show her arriving at 1010 in the evening, about an hour and 20 minutes before Burke's phone and car left that house heading north towards Santa Barbara County. The defense answer to that was narrow and technical. There is no evidence she ever got out of the rideshare vehicle. That is the kind of argument that costs a fortune to build. It requires investigators, data experts, and attorneys billing at Los Angeles rates for months. Whoever is running this defense now inherits that work and inherits it on a public defender's caseload. The new team asked the judge for more time before entering a plea. He said no. So they entered not guilty on all counts

7:37 and got to work the same morning. Here is what happens next. District Attorney Nathan Hockman said his office has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty, and he said publicly that he is confident the public defender will give Burke a zealous defense. which is the correct and professional thing for a prosecutor to say. Legal analysts in Los Angeles are already speculating that a public defender makes a plea deal more likely. I would be cautious about that. California has a moratorium on executions and has not carried one out in two decades, so the practical leverage that normally drives a plea in a case like this is not really there. The next hearing is October 19th, and at that point, the lawyers will tell the court whether they are ready for trial within 90 days. And I want to close this segment somewhere other than the money, because the money is the news and it is not the point. Celeste Rivas Hernandez was 14 years old. She was somebody's daughter in Lake Elsinore, and she got into a rideshare on an April night and never came home.

8:39 When she was found, it was months later, and it was in a vehicle in a tow yard, and nobody had been looking in the right place. There is going to be an enormous amount of coverage of this case, and almost all of it is going to be about a famous young man and his career and his money. She is the one who is dead. Someone has to say her name. When we come back, Brian Koberger confessed to four murders in open court, and now he wants a do-over. On November 13th, 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were stabbed to death in an off-campus house on King Road in Moscow. Ethan Chapin was 20.

9:33 Madison Mogan was 21. Zana Kernodle was 20. Kaylee Goncalves was 21. In July of 2025, Brian Koberger pleaded guilty. Not a no-contest plea. Not an Alford plea where you maintain innocence while accepting the conviction. He stood in a courtroom and admitted he did it in exchange for the state dropping the death penalty. Judge Stephen Hippler sentenced him to four consecutive life terms plus 10 years. That was supposed to be the end. In July of this year, one year after his sentencing, Koberger filed a handwritten petition seeking to withdraw that plea and go to trial. His position now is that he is innocent and that his own attorneys misled him into a false confession. He has been appointed a new lawyer, an Idaho attorney named Greg Rauch.

10:23 And last Thursday, Rauch filed two motions that escalate this considerably. The first asked that Judge Hipler be disqualified from hearing the post-conviction case. The second asked that the proceedings be moved out of Ada County and back to Lata County, where the students were killed. I want to walk through both of those because the reflex is to dismiss this as a guilty man wasting everyone's time, and the actual legal argument is more interesting than that. Start with the judge. At sentencing, Hippler was not restrained, and frankly, there is no reason he should have been. He called Koberger a faceless coward. He called him the worst of the worst. And he asked out loud whether this defendant was even capable of speaking the truth. Now, none of that was improper.

11:10 A judge imposing four life sentences for the murders of four young people is allowed to say what he thinks. But here is Rauch's argument, and it is not stupid. The question in a post-conviction proceeding is entirely about credibility. Koberger is claiming his lawyers coerced him and that his confession was false. The judge deciding that has to weigh whether to believe him. And that same judge already said, on the record, that he doubts this man is capable of telling the truth. The motion puts it this way. It does not rest on one adverse ruling or one harsh statement, but on the extraordinary convergence of all of them. Rauch has also pointed at a specific ruling that Hippler declined to give Koberger's original defense team more time when they said they had not finished reviewing Discovery weeks before a capital trial. which matters because that is the exact complaint at the heart of the whole petition, that his lawyers were not prepared and pushed him into a plea.

12:07 And the venue piece has an irony you can see from space. The reason this case isn't Ada County at all is that Koberger's original defense fought hard to get it out of Lotta County, arguing the community was too small and too saturated with publicity for a fair jury. They won. The case moved to Boise. Now his new lawyer wants it back in Lata County, arguing the old concerns are irrelevant because this is a proceeding decided by a judge and not a jury, and that the transfer would be more convenient for witnesses and attorneys. It is also, as it happens, where Rauch's office is and where the Lata County prosecutor sits. There is also a wrinkle in what Koberger is asking for that people keep missing. He pleaded guilty specifically to take the death penalty off the table.

12:54 Idaho was seeking execution and he traded a confession for four life terms. If he succeeds in withdrawing that plea, the deal goes with it. He would be back to facing a capital trial at his own request. Read that again. A man is asking a court for permission to put himself back in front of a jury that could sentence him to death. Either he believes something about this case that nobody else does or somebody has convinced him that this is the play. and I genuinely cannot tell you which. Prosecutors are not entertaining any of it. Their position is that Koberger has not made the substantial factual showing the law requires, and that he does not deserve an evidentiary hearing at all. They have asked that the whole petition be dismissed. Hippler has a status conference on the calendar, and the evidentiary hearing, if there is one, is currently set for June of 2027. Look, I'm going to give you my honest read. Withdrawing a guilty plea after sentencing is one of the hardest things to do in American criminal law, and it should be. The whole system depends on a plea meaning something. When Brian Koberger stood in that courtroom, he was asked a long series of questions designed for exactly this moment, and he answered them under oath with counsel beside him. That colloquy exists so that a year later, nobody can say they did not understand.

14:18 And there is a cost to this that has nothing to do with law. Four families sat in that courtroom in July of 2025 and got the closest thing to an ending this system offers. 14 months later, they are reading motions again. That said, the right to challenge a conviction on ineffective assistance grounds exists precisely because innocent people do plead guilty. It happens constantly, mostly to poor people, mostly quietly. and almost never with this much attention. Someone facing a charge they did not commit, sitting in a jail they cannot bond out of, is offered time served or a decade of exposure at trial, and they take the deal because taking the deal is the only rational move available to them. That is a real and documented failure in American criminal law, and the mechanism Brian Koberger is using exists because of those people. The principle does not become worthless because the man invoking it is who he is. That is what makes it a principle. Ethan Chapin was 20. Madison Mogan was 21. Zana Kernodle was 20.

15:26 Kaylee Goncalves was 21. They were college students asleep in a rented house on an ordinary November night, two of them with finals coming, all four of them with the entire rest of their lives scheduled. There is a roommate who survived, who saw a masked man on the second floor, and has had to live inside that memory for four years. She is in the caption of every filing too, in her way. Every filing in this case carries their names in the caption. Someone has to say them out loud too. When we come back, a surgeon facing the death penalty has now given up his lawyers, his motions, and his jury.

16:19 Stephen Kazi was 41 years old. He was an attorney in Largo, Florida. On March 21st, 2023, he walked into his office building wearing a red sweater. Surveillance cameras recorded him going in. No camera ever recorded him coming out. He had stepped away from his desk to use the restroom. Prosecutors say he was murdered in that bathroom. His body has never been found. The state's belief is that it was driven to the Everglades. At the time he disappeared, Stephen Causey was representing a client in a civil suit against a plastic surgeon named Tomasz Kosowski. Kosowski is 47, Dartmouth-trained, and has been in jail since March of 2023. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Among the things police say they recovered is a bag containing brass knuckles, a stun gun, duct tape, and masks. And they say Kozy's DNA was found in the trunk of Kasowski's vehicle. He is presumed innocent of all of it. Now, here is why this case is on our show today. And it is not the evidence.

17:28 It is what the defendant has been doing to his own defense. Kasowski has gone through multiple sets of lawyers. At least one team withdrew, citing ethical reasons. A fourth attorney asked out. Last month, he told Judge Joseph Bologna he intended to represent himself at his own capital murder trial. And in the email his outgoing attorney sent the court, there were two lines that should have made everybody in that building stop walking. That Kosowski refuses to sign consent forms for a doctor's evaluation. And that he did not want evidence presented in his defense. Then it kept going. Two weeks after firing his lawyers, he sat alone at the defense table. His former attorneys had filed motions arguing the death penalty was unconstitutional and illegally applied. Kosowski withdrew all of them. He withdrew all opposition to being executed.

18:20 On Monday, he came back and withdrew the motions to suppress evidence that his previous attorney had filed. Prosecutors then raised a request to bring jurors to the office building to see the bathroom. And at that point, Kosowski interrupted and said he did not want a jury at all. He asked for a bench trial. judge alone. And in Florida, a capital defendant has to waive a jury twice, once for the guilt phase and once for the penalty phase, because the state considers those decisions that serious. Kosowski waived both. Attorneys who follow these cases describe a dual waiver like that as exceptionally rare. Ballone asked him why he wanted it. Kosowski's answer was, I really have to answer that. And the judge said, I guess not. Ballone accepted the waiver, finding that this was a Dartmouth-trained physician who understood his rights and was making the choice knowingly. And think about what he gave away in that one sentence, because prosecutors had just been asking to take a jury to that bathroom.

19:21 A jury view is a powerful thing for the state. Twelve people standing in the actual room where a man is alleged to have died is worth more than any photograph. It is also historically the kind of thing a defense fights hard to prevent. Kosowski's response was not to fight it. It was to remove the jury entirely, which moots the whole question. If that was tactical, it is the only tactical red available. And even then, it trades a small win for an enormous one. one. And legally, that is correct. I want to be clear about that. The right to counsel is yours to waive. The right to a jury is yours to waive. Courts are not permitted to force a competent adult to mount the defense a judge would prefer.

20:06 And the alternative, where the state decides which defendants are allowed to make their own choices, is far worse than what we have. But I am going to say the uncomfortable thing anyway. Add it up. A man fires four sets of lawyers. He refuses to sign consent forms for a medical evaluation. He tells his own attorney he does not want evidence presented on his behalf. He withdraws every objection to his own execution. He withdraws the motions that might have kept evidence out. And then he gives up a jury for both phases and declines to explain why. That is not a legal strategy. Nobody has ever drawn that up on a whiteboard. I am not a doctor and I am not diagnosing anyone from a podcast studio.

20:50 Competency to stand trial is a specific legal test. And a judge who has watched this man in his courtroom for three years has found he meets it. And that judge knows more than I do. It is also true that a defendant can be perfectly competent and still be making catastrophic decisions for reasons of pride or exhaustion or a belief that the whole thing is rigged anyway. But when a man is systematically removing every protection standing between himself and an execution chamber and refuses to be evaluated and will not say why, somebody should be asking harder questions before that trial starts. That's not a mistake, that's a choice, and it is a choice being made by the one person in that room with the least ability to see it clearly. Stephen Cousy was 41. He was a lawyer doing his job representing a client in a lawsuit, which is the most ordinary thing a lawyer does in this country. He went to the bathroom at work and never came home, and his family has never had a body to bury. I keep coming back to the red sweater.

21:50 There is footage of him walking into that building in it, on an ordinary Tuesday in March, and that is the last image anyone has. No arrest photo, no crime scene, no funeral. A man in a red sweater going back to his desk. Three and a half years later, the man accused of it is preparing to try his own case in front of one judge, with no suppression motions, no objection to the death penalty, and no jury. Stephen Kazi. Someone has to say his name. That's the show for Wednesday, September 2nd. If this was useful, send it to one person. That is the whole engine on a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Three men this week tried to rewrite the rules of their own prosecutions. One wants somebody else to pay for his lawyer, one wants to take back a confession, and one wants to be tried by a single judge and will not say why. Tell me which one bothers you most, because they bother me for completely different reasons. And we are still on verdict watch in Plymouth. When that jury comes back, we will be here. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court opened Wednesday morning. The jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial completed a fourth day of deliberations without a verdict and sent no notes on Monday. If a verdict was returned after we recorded, this episode does not reflect it.

23:19 On the Los Angeles case, David Anthony Burke has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent. We have deliberately not described the evidence or the allegations in any detail, and we will not because the victim in this case was a 14-year-old child. The claim that Burke is concealing assets and corporations is a statement issued by the victim's family, not a finding by any court. A judge reviewed his financial circumstances and determined he qualified for appointed counsel. Reporting on his career earnings comes from testimony given at a prior hearing. The district attorney's office has said no decision has been made on whether to seek the death penalty. On the Idaho case, Brian Koberger pleaded guilty and was sentenced, and his petition to withdraw that plea has not been granted. Nothing in it has been established.

24:11 His claim that his prior attorneys misled him is an allegation contained in a filing, and those attorneys have not been found to have done anything improper. Prosecutors have asked that the petition be dismissed without a hearing. On the Florida case, Tomasz Kosowski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The items described as recovered by police and the reported DNA finding are allegations by the state that have not been tested at trial. Our account of his former attorney's concerns comes from an email read into the record at a hearing. We have raised questions about his decisions, but a judge who has presided over this case has found him competent to waive counsel and to waive a jury, and we are not suggesting otherwise. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a diagnosis of anyone. This episode discusses violence against children, the death penalty, and the killing of young people. If any of it is difficult to sit with, that is a reasonable reaction. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.