Bryan Kohberger Heads Back To Court In Bid To Undo Murder Confession

Bryan Kohberger will return to court next summer as he tries to undo the guilty plea that sent him to prison for life for murdering four University of Idaho students.

Judge Steven Hippler, who accepted Kohberger’s guilty plea and later sentenced him, scheduled a status conference for June 3, 2027, as the court considers Kohberger’s petition for post-conviction relief. The court also reserved June 17 for an evidentiary hearing.

Kohberger, 31, is currently serving four life sentences without the possibility of parole for the 2022 murders of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin, in addition to 10 years for breaking into the home.

But one year after admitting in court that he killed the four students, Kohberger reversed course and claimed he was innocent, arguing in a handwritten petition that ineffective assistance from his attorneys led him to falsely confess.

I now have a copy of Bryan Kohberger’s petition to revoke his guilty plea. Here is part of it. pic.twitter.com/bkuLSxpKlq

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) July 27, 2026

Kohberger claimed that he’d had “ineffective assistance of counsel” from court-appointed attorney Anne Taylor — who is one of only a few Idaho litigators approved to represent defendants in death penalty cases.

Kohberger claimed that he had not entered his guilty plea “knowingly or voluntarily because [it] was induced by unkept promises” and “because of threats asserted by [his] legal counsel.” It is unclear what those “threats” might have been. In addition, ABC News reported that Kohberger said there was some information withheld prior to his plea agreement that could have helped him.

The prosecution has filed a response to Kohberger’s petition as well as a motion to dismiss it in its entirety, but Kohberger’s attorneys have not yet responded.

Kohberger entered his guilty plea on July 2, 2025, just weeks before his trial was supposed to begin — and signed a written factual basis document one day prior in which he took full responsibility for the murders and said that the crimes he’d committed were “willful, unlawful, deliberate, with premeditation, and with malice aforethought.”