The decision on whether the case against Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin will proceed to trial is scheduled for Tuesday.
23-year-old Tyler Robinson will be present as Fourth District Judge Tony Graf hears both parties’ closing arguments. The defense and prosecution will each get two hours to give their final arguments before Graf is set to make a decision.
Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, is expected to attend the hearing.
Robinson faces six felony charges, including aggravated murder, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He also faces the Class A misdemeanor of a violent offense in the presence of a child. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty.
Could he find that the Utah County Attorney’s Office fell short of establishing probable cause? Yes, but it’s unlikely.
The hearing comes nearly two months after the case’s five-day preliminary hearing, where prosecutors were tasked with establishing probable cause that a crime was committed and that Robinson committed it.
Meanwhile, the defense used their witnesses and cross-examinations to try to convince Judge Tony Graf that there is insufficient evidence against the defendant.
What both sides are arguing
Rather than hear closing arguments in July, Graf granted a defense motion that allowed both parties to submit written closing arguments.
“The big question,” Attorney Katie Zacharia said, is whether or not the prosecution can “charge him on capital punishment.”
“I think that the state has really proven to be able to take this case to trial,” Zacharia said on Fox and Friends. “They’ve been able to prove that the shooter knew that he could harm other people in the crowd and around Charlie Kirk, and I think we’re going to see this play out.”
The prosecution said the case against Robinson is “as straight-forward a bindover decision as this Court will ever see” and argues the evidence clears the relatively low probable cause threshold on all seven counts.
The prosecution also stated that the “Defendant created a great risk of death to everyone who was in his line of fire, or who was near Mr. Kirk when Defendant pulled the trigger.”
In their briefing, Robinson’s defense attorneys argued that the state failed to make the case that he “knowingly created a great risk of death to another other than Charlie Kirk” because the shooter “hit its intended target,” and because of that “the single factor of proximity fails to permit an inference of a subjective knowledge of the shooter of a high probability of risk of death to others.”
His legal counsel also claimed the “line of fire” argument, which they accused the state of “broadly” using, does not hold up. Videos of the Sept. 10 event at Utah Valley University, they argue, undermine that theory because the shot came from an elevated angle and those standing in front of Kirk weren’t in the bullet’s path.