He Didn't Ask a Single Question on Day One of His Own Capital Trial, and the Question a Hawaii Judge Refused to Ask His Jury

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. Today is about one question asked three different ways. Who actually gets to decide? In Largo, Florida, a plastic surgeon is on trial for his life, representing himself. On day one, the state laid out its case, and when it was his turn to give an opening statement, he did not give one. When it was his turn to cross-examine the state's witnesses, he did not cross-examine any of them. In Honolulu, a judge did order an entire jury back into his courtroom over the objection of both the prosecution and the defense. And then, when they got there, he refused to ask them the question the defense most wanted answered. That refusal is the story. And it lines up exactly with something that happened in Plymouth, Massachusetts three weeks ago. And in Idaho and in Florida, two defendants are trying to get rid of their judges. One of them has already pleaded guilty to four murders. The other is on his fourth attempt. Let's get into it. Stephen Kazi was 41 years old. He was an attorney at a firm in Largo, Florida. He was married to a man named Michael Montgomery. On the morning of March 21st, 2023,

1:34 Kazi had a telephonic court hearing scheduled. Tomasz Kosawski called into that hearing. Stephen Kazi did not. Minutes before, surveillance video had recorded a gray Toyota Tundra pulling into the parking lot outside Kazi's office. Later that day, co-workers went looking for him. They went into the communal bathroom. According to prosecutors, they found blood everywhere. Yesterday, three and a half years later, the trial began. And Assistant State Attorney Alexandra Spadaro gave an opening statement that I am still thinking about. She told Judge Joseph Ballone that Stephen Causey did not disappear on his own terms, that he was murdered in the bathroom of his law firm, that his body was placed in a wagon and dragged to the parking lot and loaded into a truck. And then she said this, that his coffin was a dumpster, his hearse was a dump truck. and his burial site, where he lies in tiny, unidentifiable pieces, is the Collier County landfill.

2:33 Investigators searched that landfill for three days. They did not find him. The state's theory is that this began with a lawsuit. Kosowski filed a civil case in 2019 over medical billing. Cozy represented people Kosowski was suing. Kosowski represented himself in that case, and Spadaro told the court he made it contentious and he made it personal. particularly between himself and Stephen Kazi. She told the judge that cell phone data shows Kasowski's phone connecting to the law firm's wireless network on days when he had no reason to be on that property. And she said that in the weeks before Kazi disappeared, the firm's maintenance woman reported finding a man peeking through the law firm's window and then hiding in a dark utility closet wearing a surgical mask.

3:20 When Kosowski was arrested days later, police say they found in his car a ballistic vest with Stephen Causey's blood on it, duct tape, a paralyzing agent, syringes with sedatives, brass knuckles, a taser, two passports, and roughly $ 280, 000 in cash. Prosecutors called it a murder bag. They also said he had injuries consistent with a struggle. All of that is the state's allegation. Tomasz Kosowski has pleaded not guilty and he is presumed innocent. And not one word of it has been proven. And here's what he did about it yesterday. Nothing. He gave no opening statement. Prosecutors then called their first witnesses, including Kozy's husband and his friends and his colleagues, several of whom testified about finding blood in that bathroom and immediately thinking of one name. Tomasz Kosowski cross-examined none of them.

4:15 Not one question to any witness on the first day of a trial in which the state of Florida is asking for his execution. I want to be careful here because there is a version of this that is strategy. A self-represented defendant who cross-examines the grieving husband of a murder victim can do himself enormous damage, and in a bench trial there is no jury to perform for. A lawyer might reasonably decide to let emotional witnesses pass untouched and save the fight for the forensic testimony. That is a real tactic and I am not going to pretend it is not. But put it next to everything else. He fired four sets of attorneys. He refused to sign consent forms for a doctor's evaluation. He told his own lawyer he did not want evidence presented in his defense.

5:01 He withdrew the motions to suppress. He withdrew every objection to the death penalty. He waived a jury for both phases. He has said he does not intend to present any mitigation at all if there is a penalty phase. And now he has sat through the first day of his own capital murder trial in silence. I said Monday, I'm not a doctor and I am not diagnosing anybody. And a judge who has watched this man for three years has found him competent. And that judge knows more than I do. All of that is still true. It is also true that the state is presenting a murder case to a single human being and the defendant is not contesting any of it. One structural note about how this trial is running, because it explains the pace. There is no jury, so there is nobody to excuse from the room when the lawyers argue. There was no jury selection, which in a capital case can take weeks on its own.

5:55 There are no instructions to draft at the end. Objections get made and ruled on in front of the only person who matters, which is the same person ruling on them. And because Kosowski withdrew the suppression motions, there is no fight about what comes in. Essentially, everything the state has is going in. That is why a case that took three and a half years to reach trial may be over in a matter of days. Court resumed yesterday morning at 9.15. We will be on it again tomorrow. Stephen Kazi was 41. He went to work, he stepped away from his desk, and his husband has spent three and a half years without a body to bury. Someone has to say his name. When we come back, a judge orders a whole jury back into court, and both sides beg him not to. On March 24th, 2025, Gerhard Koenig and his wife Arielle went hiking on the Palipuka Trail on Oahu. It was her birthday. Their marriage was in trouble, and the trip was, at least partly, an attempt to salvage it. What happened on that ridge is disputed in almost every particular. Both of them testified. Each said the other started it. Prosecutors said he tried to push her off the cliff, and when that failed, tried to inject her with a syringe and beat her head with a rock.

7:22 Prosecutor Joel Garner told the jury the only thing that stopped him was being caught red-handed when two hikers came upon them. Koenig, a Maui anesthesiologist, admitted hitting his wife in the head with a rock, but testified he was acting in self-defense, and that she was the one who attacked him. On April 8th, after more than eight hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted him of attempted second-degree murder. They convicted him instead of a lesser charge, attempted manslaughter based on extreme mental or emotional disturbance. He faces up to 20 years. He has been held without bond ever since, and his sentencing has been postponed while all of this plays out. And then, immediately after the verdict, two of those jurors gave interviews to the press. The foreperson, Makalapua Atkins, said the jury convicted on the lesser charge because they did not feel the evidence would support that he intended to murder her. In one interview, she put it this way, the intent to kill is improbable to us based on the evidence presented. A second juror, identified publicly only as juror number three, said the same thing. Koenig's attorney, Thomas Otake, took that and built a motion for a new trial on two separate claims. The first is about the verdict itself.

8:38 Otake argues that under Hawaii law, even attempted manslaughter requires a finding that the defendant intended to kill. Extreme emotional disturbance mitigates the offense. It does not erase the element of intent. So if the jurors are saying publicly they never unanimously found that, the verdict rests on something the jury did not actually decide. Atkins went further and signed a sworn affidavit saying exactly that. The second claim is different in kind. During the trial on the Law and Crime livestream, an anonymous commenter claimed to be text messaging with a juror during deliberations. I want you to hold on to that for a second because I will come back to it. Last month, Judge Paul Wong held a hearing on all of it, and he made a decision that surprised everybody. Rather than rule, he said he had to hear from the jurors themselves. He cited a Hawaii Supreme Court decision requiring further inquiry. He said the court must ascertain the extent of the influence, and that the burden was on him. He also said he had to do something he really did not want to do. Both sides opposed it. The defense said its motion was strong enough without dragging jurors back. The prosecution said questioning them would violate the rules protecting deliberations. He ordered them back anyway, for September 11th. And here is what actually happened when they got there, which is the part almost every account is glossed over. Judge Wong told the courtroom he would ask the jurors one thing only, whether any of them communicated with an outsider about the deliberations or the verdict.

10:12 Nothing else. He said the questioning was being done very much out of an abundance of caution given the state of the record. Otake asked him to put on the record why he would not allow the second line of questioning, the one about whether the panel was ever unanimous on intent. And Wong confirmed it. He would not ask the jurors about their unanimity. He would not ask them about intent. He cited Hawaii's evidentiary rule barring inquiry into jurors' internal reasoning and the state Supreme Court's decision in Rickapore Hall against Philip Morris. Otake noted his objection and pointed out that even the prosecution had conceded parts of the foreperson's affidavit were not barred by that rule. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Joel Garner's position was simpler. He said they did not want to turn it into a fishing expedition. Nine jurors were present. Three could not attend, one of them not even on the island, and they will be questioned separately on September 18th. All nine answered no. Now, I want to connect this to something because it is the reason this segment is on the show. Three weeks ago in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Judge William Sullivan was handed a note from a jury foreperson saying one juror would not follow the law on reasonable doubt. A defense attorney demanded that juror be removed, accused him of lying under oath and asked the court to question him directly. Sullivan refused. He said the note did not show a juror refusing to follow the law.

11:40 and that it was not proper for him to side with one side or the other in deliberations. Two judges, two states, two completely different cases, the same month. And both of them drew the identical line. Outside contact is investigable. If someone reached into that room, a court can and must find out. That is the recognized exception, and it exists in some form in every jurisdiction in this country. What happened inside the room is not. The reasoning, the arguments, the votes, whether anybody misunderstood an instruction, who convinced whom, what the foreperson thinks now that she has had four months to reconsider. All of that is off limits. That is called the no impeachment rule. And it is one of the least understood and most important things in American law.

12:30 Here is why it exists. Without it, every losing party in every case would go find one juror willing to say, in hindsight, that they were confused. Verdicts would never be final. Jurors would be hounded by investigators for years afterward. And people would stop being candid in that room because everything they said could end up in an affidavit. So the rule says, we take the verdict, not the reasoning behind it. The verdict. It is a genuinely hard rule to love in a case like this one, where the foreperson has signed a sworn statement saying the panel never found what the verdict required. If she is right, then a man may be convicted of an offense whose elements were never established.

13:12 And the law's answer is that the courts are not allowed to look. That is uncomfortable. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But watch what happened this month. Two judges in two states under enormous public pressure in cases with cameras in the courtroom and national audiences both had every incentive to open that door. Sullivan had a defense attorney shouting at him to do it. Wong had a sworn affidavit from a foreperson in his hand. Neither one opened it. That is the rule holding. And a rule that holds when it is inconvenient is the only kind worth having. Now back to that live stream comment. The allegation that sent 12 jurors back into a courtroom in September, four months after they went home, came from an anonymous person typing into the comment section of a live trial broadcast.

14:03 Run by Law & Crime, which is the company that owns Court TV. So the network broadcasting the trial hosted the comment that produced the misconduct claim that may or may not unravel the verdict from that trial. I am not being snide about that. Law & Crime did not do anything wrong, and public access to courtrooms is a good thing that this show depends on entirely. But it is worth sitting with. We have built an apparatus where hundreds of thousands of strangers watch a trial in real time and talk to each other underneath it. And somewhere in that stream, one anonymous person made a claim that a court could not ignore. Nine jurors have now said it did not happen. Three more answer on Friday. And I want to end this segment on the person who is least mentioned in any of the coverage. Arielle Koenig survived.

14:54 She got off that trail. She testified at a three-week trial and described the worst afternoon of her life to a room full of strangers, and then sat there while a defense attorney called her deceptive. She and Gerhard Koenig have two young children. She is the reason any of this is in a courtroom at all. Someone has to say that she is still here. When we come back, two defendants trying to fire their judges. Ethan Chapin was 20. Madison Mogan was 21. Zana Kernodle was 20. Kaylee Goncalves was 21. They were stabbed to death in a rented house in Moscow, Idaho in November of 2022. In July of 2025, Brian Koberger stood in a courtroom and pleaded guilty to killing all four of them in exchange for the state dropping the death penalty. Judge Stephen Hippler sentenced him to four consecutive life terms. A year later, he filed a handwritten petition to withdraw that plea, claiming he is innocent and that his own attorneys misled him. And last month, his new lawyer moved to disqualify Judge Hippler from hearing it and to move the proceedings back to Lata County, which is the county Koberger's original defense team, fought to escape. The argument about Hippler is not frivolous, and I said so when we covered it. At sentencing, the judge called Koberger a faceless coward and the worst

16:25 of the worst, and questioned whether he was capable of telling the truth. All of that was within his rights. But the question now in front of that same judge is entirely about Koberger's credibility, and he has already said on the record what he thinks of it. Prosecutors say he has not made the showing the law requires and does not deserve a hearing at all. As things stand, an evidentiary hearing is on the calendar for June of 2027. Now take that to Florida. Rashawn Jones is accused of killing a University of Miami football teammate. This week, he made his fourth attempt to remove the judge in his case, saying he has a well-founded, firmly rooted fear that he cannot get a fair trial in front of her. She, at one point, described his proceedings as a circus. The fourth attempt. So what does the law actually require? Almost everywhere in this country, the standard is not whether a judge dislikes you, and it is not whether the judge has ruled against you, and it is not whether the judge has said something harsh from the bench at sentencing.

17:28 Adverse rulings are not evidence of bias. If they were, every defendant who lost a motion would get a new judge. What you generally have to show is either an actual conflict like a financial interest or a family relationship. or facts that would make a reasonable person question the judge's impartiality. And the filings have to allege specific facts, not conclusions. Saying you fear a judge is not enough. Saying why, with particulars, sometimes is. Koberger's motion is the stronger of the two, and it is still an uphill climb. And then there is the thing nobody says out loud about motions like these. A defendant who repeatedly moves to disqualify his judge is often not trying to win the motion.

18:12 He is building a record. Every denial is a potential appellate issue and a defendant with nothing left to lose and years of custody ahead has every reason to generate as many of those as possible. That is not cynicism. It is how the system is designed to work. The problem is that it costs something. Every one of those filings is a hearing and a response and a delay. And on the other side of every delay is a family sitting in a courtroom waiting for something to be over. There is a reason the standard is high, and it is not to protect judges. It is because the alternative, where a defendant can keep filing until he gets a judge he likes, would mean nobody ever gets tried at all.

18:52 And notice what today's three stories have in common, because I did not plan it this way and then it was sitting right there. A defendant in Florida decided he would rather no jury and no lawyer decide his fate, only a judge. A judge in Hawaii decided there was exactly one question he was permitted to ask a jury, and one he was not, and held that line with a sworn affidavit sitting in front of him. And two defendants are arguing that the judges they have are the wrong ones. All three are the same fight. Who gets to decide and on what authority and what happens when the people we hand that authority to are only people? Our whole system rests on the idea that we can put that power somewhere and then trust the answer. This week, in three different courtrooms, it mostly held. That is not a dramatic ending. It is a good one. Ethan Chapin was 20. Madison Mogan was 21. Zana Kernodle was 20.

19:50 Kaylee Goncalves was 21. Four years on, their families are reading motions about venue. Someone has to say their names. That's the show for Wednesday, September 16th. If you listen on Apple, there is a button at the top that says listen uninterrupted. $ 5 a month, no ads, and it is not just this show. It is thousands of them across Calaroga Media. 30 days free if you want to test it. To everybody who already subscribes, thank you sincerely. On Spotify, drop a comment on the Hawaii case because I keep flipping on it. A foreperson has sworn under oath that her jury never found what the verdict required, and the law says no court is allowed to ask about it. Is that rule protecting the system or protecting a mistake? We are in Largo every day this week.

20:42 On Friday, the last three Koenig jurors get questioned in Honolulu. Matthew Exton is sentenced Monday and faces up to 25 years. And a week from today, Lindsay Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan when Plymouth County should finally say whether it is retrying that case. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Florida trial. Tomasz Kosowski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. Everything described from the state's opening statement and from investigative reports is an allegation and has not been proven. Accounts have differed on the exact amount of cash recovered and on the defendant's age. A defendant has no obligation to make an opening statement or to cross-examine any witness, and declining to do so is not evidence of anything. A judge who has presided over this case for three years has found him competent to waive counsel and a jury. and nothing here is a suggestion otherwise or a diagnosis of anyone.

21:40 On the Hawaii case, Gerhard Koenig was acquitted of attempted second-degree murder and convicted of attempted manslaughter. His motion for a new trial is pending and unresolved, and Judge Wong has not ruled. The statements attributed to jurors come from their own media interviews and from a sworn affidavit provided to the defense. The allegation that a juror communicated with an outside party during deliberations originated in an anonymous comment on a trial livestream. It is unproven, and no juror has been found to have committed any misconduct. Nine jurors answered questions on September 11th, and three more are scheduled for September 18th. On the Idaho and Florida disqualification motions, Brian Koberger pleaded guilty and was sentenced, and his petition to withdraw that plea has not been granted. His claim that his prior attorneys misled him is an allegation in a filing. And those attorneys have not been found to have done anything improper. Rashawn Jones has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. This episode discusses domestic violence and the killing of young people. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available around the clock at 1-800-799-7233.