BOISE, Idaho — Last fall, Steven Hippler entered his Boise courtroom for the first time after taking over the University of Idaho student homicide case, folded his black-robed arms and introduced himself to the national audience he knew was following along. He indicated that he did so with at least moderate displeasure.

Hippler, of Idaho’s 4th Judicial District, welcomed the attorneys from each side and started into his stern message, a greeting that foreshadowed his personal stamp on how the public should expect to receive him.

“I’d like to tell you I’m happy to be here, but why start with an untruth?” Hippler deadpanned. “I am accepting of my responsibility to be here.”

The defendant, Bryan Kohberger, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of four University of Idaho students. This hearing was his first court date in Boise and was livestreamed for viewers near and far. Even with the added attention on the high-profile murder case, Hippler didn’t try to soften his blunt, unvarnished style since he took over as its presiding judge.

Hippler has had several homicide cases during his nearly 12 years on the bench, but Kohberger’s represented a first for the judge. While he has overseen “well over 100 jury trials,” Hippler said in court, he never before handled a capital murder trial.

And no trial would come. Earlier this month, Kohberger, 30, agreed to plead guilty to murder in the stabbings of the four college students in November 2022. The victims were three North Idaho women who were roommates: Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, and Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of western Washington, who was Kernodle’s boyfriend.

Kohberger accepted no chance of parole or ability to appeal in a deal brokered by his attorneys. In exchange, prosecutors dropped their pursuit of a death sentence.

To some legal experts, Hippler’s actions in the months leading up to the trial left the defense with little wiggle room.The judge ruled late last month against a request from Kohberger’s public defense team to delay the long-awaited trial. Kohberger’s attorneys posed arguments that his constitutional rights would be infringed upon after the case moved“excessively fast,” which threatened their ability to effectively represent him. It followed a string of losses for the defense.

Days after Hippler’s decision, the defense team pushed for the plea bargain.

Edwina Elcox, a former county prosecutor turned criminal defense attorney in Boise, has experience arguing in front of Hippler. She said the judge’s rulings amounted to a series of pretrial defeats that began to box in Kohberger’s attorneys on possible defenses at trial, and likely led to “frank conversations” from his legal team to consider pleading guilty to remove the death penalty.

“Judge Hippler really shaped the landscape of the litigation with his rulings,” Elcox told the Statesman. “People know that he runs a very, very, very tight ship in his courtroom.”

When a judge ordered the case moved out of Moscow, where the crime took place, Boise was a natural choice. And as the administrative district judge who sets the judicial rules for the region and helps assign the capital city’s cases, Hippler has sway over who gets picked, Idaho courts spokesperson Nate Poppino told the Idaho Statesman, despite the judge’s public umbrage about receiving the assignment.

Hippler is not entirely new to the death penalty. But court records showed that after more than 35 years in the legal profession, he has had limited experience with Idaho’s ultimate punishment.

As the adage goes, death is different.

“I’ve never done anything more difficult, and never expected to do something more difficult,” retired Idaho Supreme Court Justice John Stegner told the Statesman in a phone interview. “It takes a piece of a person’s soul to impose it.”

Before ascending to Idaho’s high court, Stegner served as a district judge in North Idaho for 21 years. Just once, early into his tenure as a judge in 2000, he oversaw a capital murder case. At that time, judges decided whether to sentence a person to death if a jury convicted them. That’s since changed after a U.S. Supreme Court decision, but the pressures from the extra scrutiny paid to death penalty cases have not, he said.

“You try not to bring that home,” Stegner said, “but I think in a capital case, it’s hard to leave at the office.”

‘Not a fan of surprises’

Like Stegner, Hippler came from a background as an attorney practicing civil law exclusively — rather than criminal — before donning the robe. During more than 20 years as an attorney, Hippler made partner at two different established Boise law firms. He mostly represented doctors, hospitals and medical providers, and largely dealt with regulatory issues, business disputes and medical malpractice lawsuits, according to a judicial biography.

Kohberger’s was the nation’s most anticipated trial this year, U.S. legal pundits have opined, if not also the biggest case in Idaho history. Hippler did not respond to a request for comment from the Statesman. Idaho judicial rules of conduct limit a judge’s ability to speak about their cases.

With the heightened stakes, including for its presiding judge, Hippler brought his no-nonsense demeanor and confidence in his command of the law to the courtroom.

Elcox called him a “taskmaster” on the bench.

“He expects both sides to be totally prepared,” she said. “As we have seen, the attorneys should expect to be extensively questioned about the legal theories and arguments they are proffering, and they should expect to be challenged by Judge Hippler on the answers they give.”

Nearing the scheduled trial, Hippler put Kohberger’s defense and prosecution on notice. He chided the defense for filing a brief without first asking his permission for extra length, and he advised that he’s able to foresee arguments before attorneys even make them, deciding on objections without letting the legal team state its case.

“A lot of this is, unfortunately, going to sound like me simply lecturing about what I want and don’t want. And that certainly is a large part of it,” Hippler said at a hearing in May. “So to start with, I’m not a fan of surprises, as you may have figured out by now.”

The parents of at least one of the four victims welcomed Hippler’s approach. As mainstays at hearings for two and and a half years, they looked forward to him helping bring justice to their case at trial.

“I appreciate it. I appreciate him being that leader that he needs to be,” Steve Goncalves, father of Kaylee Goncalves, told the Statesman last year. “I think there’s a lot of delay tactics that have been used, and I feel like he sees between the lines. He’s helped clear that up and helped steer that legal argument into a place where it can get resolved in a timely manner.”

The plea deal to avoid a trial and a possible death sentence for the man who killed their daughter stunned and angered the Goncalveses. For Hippler, who warned off anything sudden, it caught him off-guard, too.

As the judge continued to prepare for trial, he received limited notice that the defendant would plead guilty and accept life in prison. Hippler apologized to the victims’ families for the hastily scheduled hearing, where he also explained that he does not have the authority to force prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

“I, like everyone else, learned of this plea agreement Monday afternoon and had no inkling of it beforehand,” Hippler said at a Wednesday morning hearing. “Prior to that time, I was under the belief that this case was proceeding to trial.”

Thousands of prospective jurors had been scheduled to start showing up within three weeks, he said, and the court was ready to move through that selection process. Instead, Hippler is now poised to hand down Kohberger’s sentence on Wednesday.

Catholic upbringing, Notre Dame football fan

Hippler, who turns 59 this month, is a Boise native and graduate of Bishop Kelly High School, a private school run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise. His wife, Stephanie Westermeier, also is an alum, and for many years they served on the high school’s nonprofit board of directors, until the second of their two sons graduated from the school last year.

Hippler and Westermeier received their bachelor’s degrees from Boise State University. They both went to law school at the University of Utah and finished in 1991, with Hippler in the top 10% of their graduating class. They returned to Idaho and passed the bar that year, when Hippler joined his first law firm in Boise.

In the fall of 2013, then-Gov. Butch Otter appointed Hippler to be a district judge in Ada County. At the time, Otter, a fellow Bishop Kelly alum, called Hippler an “exceptionally talented litigator.”

“He brings to the bench a wealth of experience, especially in the complex and growing field of health care law,” Otter said in the statement. “I’m confident his background and training have prepared him well to be a district judge, and the people of the 4th District can expect him to be a fair, reasonable and hard-working jurist.”

Hippler has twice been reelected as a district judge, according to secretary of state data. He ran unopposed each time, most recently in 2022 for another four-year term, which expires in January 2027.

Friends and family know him as Steve, an avid fan of the Notre Dame football team, Westermeier wrote in a short biography in 2014. The names of their two sons reference the Fighting Irish, the nickname for perhaps the country’s most prominent Catholic university.

Westermeier, who is legal counsel for Saint Alphonsus Health System in Boise and Trinity Health, its parent company and a national Catholic hospital network, has written several times about the importance of the family’s faith, in trade publications and newsletters at their sons’ schools.

The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty and seeks to abolish it worldwide. The late Pope Francis reaffirmed that position in 2018 when he issued a revision to the official church doctrine known as the Catechism. It reads that the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

If Hippler had any reservations about the policy, he never brought them into the courtroom during the Kohberger case.

Hippler ruled more than a dozen times against the defense’s efforts to remove the death penalty as a sentencing option if jurors found Kohberger guilty of the murder. The defense quickly felt Hippler’s direct manner in the repeat rounds of intellectual debate on the issue, and in other blocked legal avenues from his decisions.

As losses in court stack up against a defendant charged with murder, their attorney must change course and consider a plea agreement, Keith Roark, a longtime Idaho attorney, told the Statesman.

“If you’ve reached the point where you don’t really have any defense except to try to break down the state’s case with cross-examination, if that’s where you are, then that’s a big factor,” said Roark, who has argued on both sides of capital cases. “And then a time will come to shift gears entirely. … We somehow have to stop the client from dangling at the end of a rope, and that compels you to start talking to the prosecutor.”

Hippler has in recent years played a cursory role in a couple of Idaho’s capital cases. On the request of prosecutors, he signed a death warrant in 2018 for one of the state’s nine death row prisoners, which was stayed within days by a federal judge in Idaho, according to court records. And he held a hearing last year for another death-row prisoner convicted decades ago.

In a pair of related murder cases in 2022, Hippler presided as a father and stepmother separately reached deals with prosecutors to plead guilty to the death of the man’s 9-year-old son. He sentenced each to life in prison without parole.

As the four-county region’s administrative district judge, Hippler also helped plan and coordinate, though did not preside over, the murder trials of Lori Vallow Daybell in 2023 and Chad Daybell in 2024, which were moved to Boise from eastern Idaho. Each was convicted, but a possible death sentence was dropped for Vallow Daybell because of a procedural error. Her husband is the state’s latest addition to death row.

“I’ve certainly seen a lot of big trials, significant trials,” Hippler told East Idaho News during Vallow Daybell’s trial in April 2023. “We’ve had cases with a lot of local media interest. But in terms of the degree of national and international media interest, in my 10 years here, I’ve not seen that.”

Kohberger’s trial was expected to surpass that.

‘It will affect you’

In September, the prior judge in the case, Judge John Judge, granted the defense’s request for a venue change, agreeing that leaving Moscow improved Kohberger’s chances for a fair trial. Then the 2nd Judicial District judge retired. The Idaho Supreme Court named Hippler to head up the case days after Judge announced his decision not to move with the trial.

From the tone he struck at the outset, Hippler made it clear that his temperament and methods were distinct from that of the previous judge.

By comparison, Judge struck a much lighter tone in his Moscow courtroom for nearly two years, at times even using humor to try to diffuse contentious hearings. He also lent a longer leash to attorneys, permitted extended arguments and, in more than one instance, allowed the defense to call experts to testify during pretrial proceedings — none of which Hippler has approved to date.

Among all of the attorneys in the case, only Elisa Massoth, co-counsel for the defense, has previously appeared in front of Hippler, he said in court. “He’s such a different person” from Judge, Massoth told an acquaintance on a break in the hallway of the courthouse in Boise within earshot of a Statesman reporter.

Had Roark been on Kohberger’s defense team, he would have been “very disappointed” to learn Hippler received the assignment after a successful push for a venue change, he told the Statesman.

A former president of the Idaho Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Roark said he’s argued in Hippler’s courtroom just once for a procedural matter. But from conversations with other attorneys, the judge’s reputation is that of “being unnecessarily strict,” and not particularly sympathetic to the defense.

“There isn’t a judge of the year award,” Roark said of the state’s defense attorney association. “But if there was such an award, Judge Hippler would never receive it.”

Still, Roark added, the priority for a defense team preparing for trial has to be the jurors.

“If you get the jury, to hell with the judge,” he said. “You just battle in.”

Hippler acknowledged the critical role he would play in Kohberger’s trial. He noted the “unprecedented publicity” already present in the case in an earlier ruling, and understood every decision he made would be closely analyzed.

Former Idaho U.S. Attorney Wendy Olson, now a partner at a private firm in Boise, has argued in front of Hippler several times and described him as “a really good judge.” He was up to the task, which included holding up under the spotlight, she told the Statesman in an interview.

“Judge Hippler has an outstanding reputation for being as efficient as possible, for very carefully considering the arguments of the parties,” Olson said. “He makes decisions based on the law and the evidence, and not whether he likes or dislikes the lawyers — and that’s exactly what you want in a judge.”

Almost as if anticipating the considerable burden he would shoulder as judge in his first capital case, Hippler in fall 2019 shared words of encouragement during a commencement speech he delivered to Idaho’s newest corrections officials after they completed their training as peace officers.

“Be mindful that the trauma you face at work will come home with you. It will affect you even if you cannot perceive that it is. Listen to your loved ones when they tell you that it is affecting you,” Hippler shared in the Idaho Capitol rotunda. “Your community asks a lot of you in this job, but I’m confident — and your community is confident — in you and your ability to do the job with distinction.”

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