BOISE, Idaho — Attorney Anne Taylor made a decision some 20 years back that set the course of her life and her legal career: She chose to become a public defender.

After a half-dozen years practicing law, most of that time as a county prosecutor in North Idaho, Taylor went to work on the other side of the courtroom. There, during her extended tenure in the Kootenai County Public Defender’s Office, Taylor seemed to find her professional calling, she told the Coeur d’Alene Press several years ago. The role entailed looking out for the interests of some of the people she used to prosecute.

“It’s such necessary work,” Taylor said. “It’s important to make sure constitutional rights apply to everybody. You help people who are facing horrible times. I love the work.”

Last year, in the thick of defending Bryan Kohberger, who would eventually plead guilty to killing four University of Idaho students, she doubled down on her commitment to that legal responsibility. Taylor told the local newspaper that the duty of defending indigent clients remains her “dream job.”

“It’s always a fight,” she said. “You spend a lot of time in the jails. People who do it believe in it.”

The court’s gag order prevents attorneys in the case from making public statements. Taylor didn’t respond to an interview request from the Idaho Statesman.

Even dating back to her early years as a lawyer, Taylor developed a reputation as one ready for a brawl. She would duke it out on behalf of her client if that’s what it required, said Michael Palmer, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Coeur d’Alene.

“She certainly wasn’t a pushover in any way. She handled her cases,” he said in a phone interview with the Statesman. “You were going to have to go in prepared to negotiate anything with her.”

Taylor, who’s 59 this month, has now become a well-known figure in the Kohberger case after entering the ring to lead his public defense team. Earlier this month, through a plea agreement that came after two and a half years of legal proceedings, she achieved what several defense attorneys told the Statesman is the primary obligation in a capital case: saving their client’s life.

Kohberger, 30, a graduate student at Washington State University in Pullman, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and a count of felony burglary for fatally stabbing the four U of I students in an off-campus Moscow home in November 2022. The victims were Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21, and Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20.

Just four weeks before jury selection for the highly anticipated trial, Kohberger agreed to plead guilty to the murder and burglary charges in exchange for prosecutors’ dropping of the death penalty, despite outcry from two of the victims’ families.

As part of the deal, Kohberger accepted life in prison with no chance of parole, and no ability to appeal. But was it a victory for the defense?

In the court of public opinion, Taylor faced mounting skepticism of Kohberger’s innocence. A knife sheath found at the crime scene had his DNA. Cellphone towers and security cameras traced his location near the area around the time they were killed, according to prosecutors. And leaked details to NBC’s “Dateline” appeared to further implicate her client.

“I doubt very much that there was going to be an acquittal in this case,” said Keith Roark, a longtime Idaho attorney who has been on both sides of capital murder cases. “So if you do your job, your responsibility is to use every legitimate means to keep your client off the gallows, if you will.”

Roark called the Kohberger case likely an “all-or-nothing” situation, meaning a jury would convict or acquit on all five charges. And, at some point, a defense attorney has to take stock of the situation and consider a plea, he told the Statesman.

The work of a capital-qualified defense attorney isn’t for everyone. It’s often daunting, and requires 14-hour workdays, seven days a week, Roark said. But Taylor handled the intense pressure of Kohberger’s closely watched case, he said.

“She’s probably the perfect person for a very difficult job. She leaves no stone unturned and is not intimidated by anything, or anybody,” said Roark, who has known Taylor for nearly a decade. “She’s showing in this case a great work ethic and she will do everything she is legally, ethically, professionally compelled to do — and a little more after that.”

The U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantees everyone the right to an attorney during prosecution. It is the necessity of criminal defense lawyers to cast aside any judgment of their clients to ensure they are properly represented in a court of law, Palmer said.

“Anne is a genuinely good person and wants to thoroughly, effectively defend her cases,” he said. “I really believe she believes in what she does. The Constitution, if it doesn’t work for all of us, it doesn’t work for any of us.”

In her role as a capital-qualified lead defense attorney — the only one for murder cases in North Idaho — Taylor is again expected to be seated next to Kohberger, now a confessed killer, at his scheduled sentencing on July 23.

Taylor’s litigation formula

A native of the state, Taylor grew up in Eastern Idaho and received her bachelor’s degree in political science, followed by a master’s in public administration, from Idaho State University. She graduated from U of I’s law school in 1998, passed the state’s bar exam that same year and remained in the Idaho Panhandle to launch her legal career.

Taylor wed fellow attorney Jed Whitaker, who also worked as a county public defender and later left for the Kootenai County Prosecutor’s Office. The couple cited irreconcilable differences and had their marriage annulled in July 2011, court record showed. Whitaker declined an interview request from the Statesman.

Taylor has four daughters, now all adults. She left the public defender’s office in 2012 and later joined forces at a private law firm with Palmer, whom she first met in law school. At the time, Taylor was a single mom with two of her kids still at home, he said. She’s also a dog lover, and always owned two or three at a time, from Pomeranians to large breeds, such as huskies or shepherds, Palmer added.

When they worked together, Palmer said, he and Taylor grabbed lunch on occasion to discuss firm business, or would run into each other at a social function, such as a weekend barbecue or birthday party. He described Taylor as a tireless worker who balanced parenting with her sizable caseload.

“When she was not hosting, she had a file open and was reviewing something, writing something. I mean, she never stops,” said Palmer, who has known Taylor for almost 30 years. “Clearly she sleeps sometime, but I’m not sure when.”

From 2014 to 2017, Taylor landed some of the biggest cases of her career, as lead defense attorney in a string of homicide cases of significant public interest.

Taylor’s litigation history shows she follows a formula in murder cases, and used a similar strategy to defend Kohberger.

While representing a 26-year-old Shoshone County woman accused in 2014 of suffocating her boyfriend’s 22-month-old child, Taylor succeeded in getting the trial moved to Kootenai County out of concern of seating an impartial jury. In 2017, she won another venue change to Kootenai County in a highly publicized case out of Nez Perce County for a former sheriff’s deputy charged with killing his ex-wife. Taylor was able to push out each trial for more than two years for additional time to prepare.

In the latter case, as she deployed with Kohberger and still another murder case before it, she requested that her clients be allowed to wear civilian clothes at hearings leading up to trial.

At trial for the woman charged with first-degree murder in the death of her boyfriend’s toddler, Taylor obtained an acquittal. She built reasonable doubt with jurors by arguing that police conducted an inadequate investigation that did not consider other suspects, and pointed to the boyfriend’s personal ties to local law enforcement.

“The jury did the right thing,” Taylor told the Coeur d’Alene Press following the verdict. “We’re so happy that this is finally over. Finally, the truth comes out.”

After a Lewiston man was convicted of first-degree murder for killing his ex-wife, who was strangled to death with a belt in 2011, Taylor was appointed to defend him with a new jury after the Idaho Supreme Court ordered a retrial because the lower court had not allowed Joseph Anthony Thomas Jr. to present a defense that his ex-wife died by autoerotic asphyxiation, choking herself in the midst of a sex act. A jury again convicted Thomas in 2017.

A week later, Taylor returned to her roots in public defense and accepted the head position at the Kootenai County Public Defender’s Office. She received the Kohberger case, the most high-profile of her career, five years into that tenure.

Representing someone who could face capital punishment requires a unique combination of experience, courage and dedication, said Bob Boruchowitz, longtime director of the Defender Initiative at Seattle University’s law school. The job is taxing and little else in law can prepare an attorney for it, he told the Statesman in a phone interview.

He recalled having nightmares about executions and waking up feeling paralyzed in his first capital case. Having your client’s life in your hands, Boruchowitz said, and recognizing the “enormous consequence to your client” leaves a significant emotional drain.

“Lawyers are human beings and certainly can be affected by grisly details. But the reality is that everyone is entitled to a fair trial and a fair sentencing if they’re convicted,” Boruchowitz said. “In the cases that are the most horrifying, we have to spend the most effort to make sure that the outcome is just.”

‘Pound the table’

A year after taking up the Kohberger case, Taylor filed for a change of venue out of Moscow, where the homicides took place. It took a couple of months more before Latah County Judge John Judge took up her request to change the venue of the trial.

Despite the wait, Taylor’s work began to pay off.

Late last year, she convinced Judge to grant the venue change, and the Idaho Supreme Court sent the case to Boise.

Before that, Taylor went toe to toe in the courtroom to win a slew of records from law enforcement’s use of an advanced DNA technique during the investigation. That technique, known as investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, initially led police to Kohberger as the suspect, the two sides and the judge acknowledged. The FBI kept limited records and had not previously turned them over to prosecutors, and much about the process is veiled in secrecy. After Taylor’s request, prosecutors obtained the records and turned them over to the defense.

The wins were hard-earned, and also came with repeated losses. The defense took those records to argue Kohberger’s constitutional rights were violated when the FBI used public ancestry databases to identify crime-scene DNA as Kohberger’s. But Judge Steven Hippler, now overseeing the case, rejected Taylor’s efforts to exclude any evidence against Kohberger that detectives developed once they knew his DNA was found at the Moscow home on King Road.

Taylor led the defense in exploring nearly every avenue to challenge the state’s case, and eventually met some dead ends. Her team failed to have the grand jury’s unanimous indictment dismissed before unsuccessful bids to submit a Kohberger alibi on the morning of the murders.

Defense attorneys later turned their efforts toward trying to knock out capital punishment as a possible sentence for their client if he was convicted at trial. Idaho will soon use a firing squad to carry out the death penalty — the only state to shoot prisoners to death as its primary method of execution.

Taylor and her team attempted 13 times to toss out the option. They argued that it would be cruel and unusual punishment, that the crime didn’t have aggravated factors used to justify a death sentence, and that Kohberger’s autism spectrum diagnosis should preclude it, to name a few. None of them worked.

In zealously defending her client, Taylor pursued everything in court that she could, author Howard Blum, who wrote a book about the case, told East Idaho News.

“There’s an old legal saying: ‘When you have the facts, you pound the facts; when you don’t have the facts, you pound the table,’ ” Blum said. “And she was pounding the table pretty well for two and half years. But at the end of the day, she just didn’t have anything left to pound.”

What perhaps proved to be insurmountable was the defense’s failed bid to obtain a trial delay over concerns of being ineffective for Kohberger without enough time to review all of the evidence received in discovery. Hippler also denied Taylor’s push to present evidence of alternative suspects at trial, had it moved forward.

Within days of the denial, Taylor contacted Bill Thompson, the lead prosecutor in the case against Kohberger, and began to negotiate a plea bargain. Latah County’s longtime elected prosecutor has since faced public scrutiny for not taking the case to trial, and agreeing to the deal that spares Kohberger’s life.

Another capital case

Taylor’s role leading Kohberger’s defense is made all the more intriguing by the fact that it almost didn’t happen.

A month into receiving the court’s assignment, she faced questions — including from the presiding judge — about whether a potential conflict of interest might disqualify her. As the chief of the county public defender’s office, Taylor briefly represented a parent of one of the four murder victims in an unrelated case. She withdrew from that parent’s case the same day Kohberger made his first appearance in an Idaho courtroom, court records showed.

Taylor said at the closed-door hearing that she consulted the Idaho State Bar counsel, and determined she did not have a conflict representing Kohberger, according to the unsealed minutes from the hearing held in January 2023. The record was made public after an attorney for the Goncalves family filed for its release, which the judge granted. The Goncalveses also promoted an online petition that demanded Taylor be pulled from the case, which garnered almost 11,000 signatures.

Kohberger told the judge that he wished to retain Taylor as his attorney and that the potential issue was resolved. She remained his lead defense attorney all through the proceedings.

Taylor was paid $200 an hour to represent Kohberger, nearly four times her salary as chief of the Kootenai Public Defender’s Office. For the capital case assignment, she has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At the same time, she saw to its conclusion a separate North Idaho murder case in Grangeville. Taylor defended Richard Brad Ross, who agreed to enter an Alford plea — which effectively acts as the defendant pleading guilty while maintaining their assertion of innocence — for two murders in order to avoid the death penalty. Ross was sentenced in February 2024 to life imprisonment.

Taylor filed to relaunch a private practice in June last year, secretary of state records showed, and a month later ended her run as the county’s lead public defender. In August last year, she accepted an assignment to take on a second death penalty case, that of yet another high-profile defendant. Idaho prisoner Skylar Meade is charged with killing a man in Nez Perce County after he escaped incarceration in an orchestrated ambush of prison staff that drew national attention during a March 2024 visit to a Boise hospital.

In response to Taylor’s request for more time on Kohberger’s case during court proceedings in April, Hippler raised the issue of her decision to accept the appointment to Meade’s capital case when she still faced Kohberger’s looming trial, which was expected to last 15 weeks.

“At what point are you ready?” Hippler pressed. “You took on a new death penalty case since you came on to this case. Why would you do that if you were not having enough time on this case?”

Taylor took the punch. But she got her gloves back up, and countered.

“Your Honor,” Taylor said, “when I agreed to take that case, we had a certain pace going in this case already. And then things have happened since that point in time in this case that have set us back.”

The two had sparred at times during portions of the all-day hearing. Hippler expressed his satisfaction with the intellectual exercise.

“I enjoy dialoguing with you, counsel. I appreciate it,” he said.

“Well, good,” Taylor responded. “I think we’re going to have some time together over the next six months or so.”

Instead, Taylor eventually pursued a plea bargain for Kohberger, who now awaits his sentence.

“She did what she had to do, and she saved her client’s life,” Roark said. “Of course, the flip side of that is his life will be spent inside prison walls, and that’s not much of a life for most people. And there are those who argue a life sentence without the possibility of parole is, in the final analysis, a crueler punishment than death itself.”

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