Edelman, a co-founder of the trial consulting group Trial Innovations, is set to give expert testimony at the April 17 evidentiary hearing regarding cameras in the courtroom.
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In a Monday court filing, the defense team for Tyler Robinson, the man charged with assassinating Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, revealed that they intend to call as an expert for testimony in an April court hearing, Dr. Bryan Edelman. Edelman played a key role in getting a change of venue granted in the Bryan Kohberger case.
Edelman, a co-founder of the trial consulting group Trial Innovations, is set to give expert testimony at the April 17 evidentiary hearing regarding cameras in the courtroom. The motion from the defense states that Edelman believes “the modern internet and social media ecosystem—especially algorithmic curation and personalization—has fundamentally altered how news is consumed and makes local, high-profile publicity substantially harder to avoid for residents of the locality where the events giving rise to the case occurred and the case is being tried.”
He is set to testify on polling results related to the case, as well as the demographics of Utah County’s adult population from which the jury pool would be selected and as his opinions regarding “social media coverage of notorious criminal cases.”
The motion stated that local residents frequently do not need to seek out local news due to algorithmic ranking online, “feeds, recommended modules, and notifications, as well as through social sharing within local networks,” which makes “sustained avoidance during trial more difficult than in legacy media environments.”
The defense also said that online environments “frequently include large volumes of user-generated commentary that may be less moderated than print or broadcast channels. Empirical research shows that exposure to uncivil or hostile online commentary can shift perceptions and intensify reactions to the underlying information.” Such negative pretrial publicity, the defense said, “can bias juror judgments, increase the likelihood of guilty verdicts in experimental settings, and contribute to memory and source-monitoring errors, including misattributing pretrial information as trial evidence.”
In the case of Bryan Kohberger, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of four University of Idaho students, Edelman testified in support of changing the venue for the trial, which was ultimately granted. In his testimony, Edelman had argued that getting an impartial jury in Latah County, where the murders occurred, was not attainable because the case had been “seared into the community’s consciousness,” and because many residents have some sort of connection to the case.
“People here have demonstrated they would experience fear, stress, panic in this community. There’s significant rumors and misinformation that have been spread and people have been exposed to in this community. There’s a feeling of pressure to convict,” he said.
The case was ultimately moved to Ada County. Edelman’s firm, Trial Innovations, had conducted surveys in four Idaho counties, including Ada and Latah counties. A filing noted that respondents in Latah County would have been outraged if Kohberger was not convicted, while respondents in Ada County would “take it well.”
On Trial Innovation’s website, it states that Edelman has been “retained as an expert witness to evaluate the impact of pretrial publicity on the jury pool and the potential need for a change of venue” in multiple cases.
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