court records
court records

court records

ATTORNEY

Kohberger’s Lawyer Also Represented Second Victim’s Parents

Bryan Kohberger - Idaho Murders
Bryan Christopher Kohberger poses for a jail booking photograph at the Monroe County Correctional Facility
Reuters / MONROE COUNTY CORRECTIONAL

KEY POINTS

  • Public defender Anne Taylor previously represented the father and stepmother of murder victim Madison Mogen
  • Taylor handled the misdemeanor drug cases of Mogen’s parents
  • The mother of another victim of the Idaho student murders said she was heartbroken after Taylor dropped her as a client

Anne Taylor, the Kootenai County public defender representing the Idaho murders suspect Bryan Kohberger, has ties to the parents of another victim in the fatal stabbings.

Court documents obtained by Inside Edition Digital revealed that Taylor previously represented the father and stepmother of Madison Mogen, one of the four University of Idaho students Kohberger was accused of killing in November 2022.

Taylor was a member of the defense counsel on criminal cases involving Benjamin Mogen and his wife, Korie Hatrock, according to court records.

Taylor defended Mogen when he faced two misdemeanor drug charges in September 2020. Her client eventually pleaded guilty to one of the charges as part of a deal with prosecutors. Mogen was sentenced to 90 days in prison.

Mogen’s wife, Hatrock, also worked with Taylor in June last year after she was charged with one misdemeanor and two felony drug counts.

Like her husband, Hatrock had also struck a plea deal with prosecutors and entered a guilty plea to one of the felony drug counts.

According to the court records, the case is closed, and there has been no development in the case since Dec. 28, 2022, a few days before Kohberger was arrested.

The new revelations about Kohberger’s defense lawyer came after it was reported that Taylor represented the mother of another one of Kohberger’s alleged murder victims, Xana Kernodle.

Taylor represented Cara Northington in a

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LAW

Multiple county defendants, one lawyer: Judge previously ruled it’s not OK. So why are they doing it again?

In February 2018, Frankie Greer had a seizure and fell from the top of three jail bunks, suffering a serious brain injury.

A year later, Greer’s family filed a lawsuit against the nurse who had assessed him during the jail’s intake process, the two deputies responsible for assigning him to the top bunk and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which employs all three.

The County of San Diego outsourced the entire case to one private attorney despite there being multiple defendants with conflicting stories: the nurse says she properly alerted housing deputies that Greer had a seizure disorder and needed a bottom bunk; the housing deputies claim she entered the alert into part of the jail’s information management system that they could not access.

This leaves the attorney hired by the county with an impossible, and potentially unethical, task: defending two parties who blame each other for wrongdoing. Under California rules for practicing law, it’s unethical for one lawyer to represent people whose stories are at odds.

And this is not a new issue for the county. It faced an almost identical scenario in a 2002 lawsuit filed by the family of Marshawn Washington, who suffocated to death after being hog-tied by jail deputies. Judge Larry Burns ruled then that county counsel could not represent both the jail nurse, who had failed to report to deputies that Washington had respiratory problems, and the deputies who had restrained him.

Burns wrote in his ruling that “statements made by the correctional officer and nurse defendants raise a very real prospect that one group of Defendants may attempt to shift the blame to the other, thus rendering it impossible for any attorney to effectively represent both groups in the same proceeding without compromising the rights of either.”

Like in the Washington

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