Defense does not want video of Charlie Kirk assassination shown at hearing
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Pat Reavy, KSL
PROVO, Utah (KSL) — Tyler Robinson and his defense team do not want a video of Charlie Kirk being assassinated shown in the courtroom during Robinson’s next scheduled hearing on Feb. 3.
On Tuesday, Robinson filed a notice of objection to the state’s “proposed exhibit 4.1.” According to the court filing, that exhibit “is a video clip of the shooting of Mr. Charlie Kirk. The video is in color and from a distance of only a few feet away from Mr. Kirk. There is audio contained within the video clip capturing sounds, including unidentified voices, immediately before, during and after the shooting.”
The video “is graphic and likely highly disturbing to any person who views it, negatively impacting Mr. Robinson’s constitutional right to a fair trial,” Robinson argues.
The hearing on Feb. 3 is a continuation of one that started on Jan. 16 regarding whether the Utah County Attorney’s Office should be disqualified from the case because one of their prosecutors has an adult child, a Utah Valley University student, who attended the Turning Point USA rally when Kirk was killed.
Robinson, 22, is charged with capital murder and faces a possible death sentence if convicted of shooting and killing Kirk on Sept. 10.
In their objection, Robinson’s defense team argues the video “has no proper role” in the Feb. 3 hearing.
“This proposed exhibit is clearly inadmissible. If admitted, which would be in contravention of the Utah Rules of Evidence, it should remain sealed until it is admitted into evidence, if it is, at trial,” the court filing states.
Robinson says showing the video at the next hearing would result in “confusing the issues” and could potentially jeopardize his right to a fair trial by tainting a future jury.
“The video of Mr. Kirk’s death has no tendency to make any fact relating to the motion to disqualify more or less probable than it would be without the introduction of the video. The state has submitted still photos and diagrams, none of which Mr. Robinson objects to, showing Mr. Kirk’s location and proximity to the audience and the believed location of the family member of a member of the prosecution team, which are wholly sufficient to impart the relevant information that the state believes should be considered by this court,” the defense argues.
In the objection, Robinson again cites the significant interest the case has generated.
“As the highly biased traditional local and national media and nouveau international social media coverage of this case demonstrates, every in-court statement by attorneys representing the state, whether under oath or not, every statement by counsel for Mr. Robinson, and every observation and ruling by this court are under a microscope and subject to micro-surgery by journalists, bloggers, media ‘experts,’ and others,” the defense says.
In their objection, the defense also makes note of their efforts to ban cameras and microphones from the public court hearings, while attorneys for the media argue that the legal proceedings should not be conducted in secret.
“To make matters worse, those media entities which now purport to refer to themselves as ‘litigants’ in this prosecution, in complete disregard of this court’s admonition to the contrary, seek to ensure that every single pleading filed in and statement to this court is available for widespread public dissemination long before a neutral, untainted and reliably unbiased jury is ever impaneled, undoubtedly undermining the ability of this court and the two litigants to do so,” Robinson states in his objection.
First Amendment attorneys have argued that there has never been a case in Utah in which a defendant was found to have received an unfair trial because of pretrial publicity, even though there have been many high-profile criminal cases in Utah before Robinson’s.
Defense attorneys point to electronic media violating the judge’s decorum order during the last two hearings. The order lays out what cameras can and cannot shoot while in the courtroom. At the last hearing, Robinson argued that video of him conferring with his attorneys was not shot from a distance and resulted “in absurd but widely published opinions from putative ‘lip readers’ and others who seek fame and future from interpreting facial expressions or the lack thereof, are brushed off by the media’s in-court representatives as unintentional mistakes that will not be repeated, again. This is, alas, the context in which the present hearing and the present objection must be viewed,” the objection claims.
The defense says it will again ask at the beginning of the Feb. 3 hearing that “both the videographer and the still photographer (be prohibited) from capturing close-up images of Mr. Robinson while he is seated at the counsel table. Widespread publication of these images has served no legitimate purpose and merely fuels rampant, unfounded speculation about Mr. Robinson’s state of mind during these proceedings.”